http://www.theultimatesteal.com/home.asp

$60 gets you Office 2007 Ultimate, which has:

Access™ 2007
Accounting Express 2007
Excel® 2007
Groove® 2007
InfoPath® 2007
OneNote® 2007
Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager
PowerPoint® 2007
Publisher 2007
Word 2007

In other words, damn near everything. You do need a .edu email address in order to verify your a student (with the possibility of needing to provide additional proof on request).

Otherwise it's a damn good deal.

Yes, I ripped this from SH/SC. Sue me.

Wow, that's nice. I got a copy of Professional for free from attending a Microsoft launch event.

Tempting, but OpenOffice has always been good enough for me.

Does office 2007 require Vista?

Nope.

i got office enterprise 2007 for $20 from work

They sent me Vista and Office Ultimate for free. Awesome deal though!

At first I thought this was a spambot.

I found open office to be slow and not so great. It was kind of crash happy for me... I havent tried it in a while though

It's better on Linux. Version 2.0 is where it really started to be good.

It's kind of hard to go back after getting used to Office. Kind of like going from Photoshop to Gimp or Paint Shop Pro. I would definitely buy it Office if they had Linux binaries.

oh awesome, i get paid tommorrow

"only for students"

That sucks.

Office 2003 is so much better than OpenOffice 2.x it's not even funny. Office 2007 is so much better than Office 2003 it's not even funny.

You do the math.

OpenOffice is free, but so is a turd, doesn't make it good.

For US Army members you can get Microsoft® Office Enterprise 2007 on DVD, which includes Outlook, Publisher, Excel, Word, Power Point, and Access, for $19.95. Wow. I may have to get legal.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/01/atMSoffice070129/

(nevermind, US only)

That would be great if, ya know, I had $60.



I'm going to go crawl back into my cardboard box now.

as if you guys havent already dl'ed this through torrents

I'm sure most people prefer to be legal when they can afford it. $20-60 is well within reason.

That was Vista Business and Office Professional, which has Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher, and Word. I got both packages for free too.:awesome:

And Ultimate has no Visio?

OK, I'll take the bait.

How is MSoffice "better?" Better is a relative term. Granted, MSoffice has many features that OO.o doesn't, but then again, how many people use everything that MSoffice has to offer?

It is better in many ways but, as you say, better is a relative term. OpenOffice is far better in that it is feature packed and free to the average person. I was happy to use OpenOfficeOrg when I did not have access to Office. I would say that in my experience with spreadsheets I found Excell superior in small ways that matterred to me. Funnily, I built the spreadsheet that I most noticed the differences in OO.o.

Of course with oo.o you also have the ability to use portable oo.o which is cool. If you rely on MSO and have to use a computer without it, you're screwed. Except POO.o can open MSO so you're still AOK.

I've been forced to use Office to write architecture specs for the software I write at my job. The whole company uses Office and the documents OpenOffice outputs don't look quite right in Office. I don't mind so much since it's a work computer and I didn't have to pay for it. I run VMWare and I have XP inside and I run Office through that. Even in VMWare with XP virtualized, the interface is still faster than OpenOffice. OpenOffice is better in a lot of ways however - the outline mode and styles work so much better. They're less finnicky, simpler, and they work more consistently. It's possible for me to do everything I need to do in Office, but I have to wade through literally hundreds of checkboxes and whatnot to find the right box to check or uncheck. I've gotten used to it and I don't mind it so much. For me, using linux and openoffice wasn't ever about the quality of the applications, it was more about not wanting to support a crappy company like microsoft. Has anyone else read about them forcing updates to XP computers w/out asking the user even when autoupdate was off? I just can't believe people put up with it.

Not many, because until 2007, the interface was awful and had many functions hidden in subtree upon subtree of drop down menus.

Office has more features, is much more well implemented, faster, easier to use (useful help files, what a marvel!), better interface (especially 2007), cleaner, faster, easier to use, did I say faster?

It's a shame it's for just students and not students and teachers like apple stuff is.

And it's windows only I take it? (as in not OSX)

Yeah Martyn, although Office 2008 is the Mac port. I'm not sure when that will be out.

Ta for the clarification Emon.

I have learned!

It's really just charity for students who would (possibly) otherwise just steal it. Some teachers would likely qualify for the "home use program" if the institution they work for licensed it with Microsoft. That is what the Army did as referred to in the link I cited above and why Army employees can purchase Office for $20.

I want this article about this supposed "forced updates". I've never seen it happen, and I don't see how they could possibly force it. Sounds like a bunch of to me.

A rumor spread by an idiot ZDnet writer?? No way! I've not seen that before!

Uhm, a Microsoft employee confirmed that they made a forced update. His blog entry is linked in the article.

Yes, for Windows Update itself, not other software.

So what? It's still a forced update. Even if they just changed some graphics it's still a forced update that the user did not expect. And in the past Microsoft made updates to Windows Update through ... Windows Update, like they did with every other part of Windows.

By your own fancy article:

"There is a fourth option for Windows Update, which is for it to be turned off altogether. Windows Update "does not automatically update itself when Automatic Updates is turned off," Clinton wrote."

So in other words, it's :tinfoil:.

It install itself when you select to only be notified of new updates.

From TFA:
"Had we failed to update the service automatically, users would not have been able to successfully check for updates and, in turn, users would not have had updates installed automatically or received expected notifications," the product manager, Nate Clinton, wrote. "That result would not only fail to meet customer expectations but even worse, that result would lead users to believe that they were secure even though there was no installation and/or notification of upgrades."

It's

Which as the article describes is not turning automatic updates off.

How is it supposed to notify you of new updates when it doesn't know how to connect to the server?

Wooh! Downloading now. Thanks for the link, Cool Matty!

It's not new for Windows Update to notify you of an update for Windows Update. Why didn't they do that?

Can we settle on "No, Microsoft did not force an update with automatic updates turned off. But they installed an update without the user allowing them to do it."?