Microsoft Office Standard Student and Teacher Edition 2003

Our price:	$149.99
Manufacturer:	Microsoft
Release date:	21 October, 2003

Average user rating: Average user rating: 3

Meh... It's MS Office.

Alright, people. There is no denying that MS Office is good. In fact, it's been perfectly usable since their '97 edition; most of the improvements made since then have been incremental, and there's the rub. This software costs over $100. Most people will only use Word, which means the rest of the suite is just dead weight.

You want a viable alternative? Go to www.openoffice.org and download a copy of OpenOffice. It's FREE. It includes a first-rate word processor, a presentation program, and a spreadsheet, not to mention a drawing program and scads of other features. It opens Word files. You can save your work to MS Word's file format if that is a requirement. Did I mention that is is free? Schools and corporations are taking notice of this. They don't like spending millions on software licences. That's why they're using OpenOffice. Check it out and then pat yourself on the back for saving a hundred bucks. Unless you're in publishing and need the extra features of Word, you are unlikely to see any difference.

great software

I recently bought a notebook with Windows XP home edition. Naturally, there was no Microsoft Office in the package so my computer felt crippled. I'm currently in need of a word processor so I tried downloading every freeware that was rated better than MS Word. Unfortunately, I didn't find any of them useful. I still prefer MS Office over any other. Even though this is only the Student and Teacher Edition, it's still loaded with very useful programs.

A little expensive and not a lot of products in there

I am a teacher evaluating the software suites offer for my school in Ontario, Canada.

- The ministry of education pays for Corel's suite, but my students can not use it at home.
- Microsoft Office with ONLY word, excel, ppt = 200$ is too expensive, I cannot ask all my students to get that, therefore I cannot rely on it
- OpenOffice.org free for everybody, comes with equivalents to word, excel, ppt, access, frontpage, vector graphics... for free. I can then ask everybody to have it. It reads Microsoft documents. Learning curve is reasonably low.
- StarOffice is free for Students and Teachers in school and at home. A good choice as well.