Still As Life

If you are an Australian uni student, like myself, you might be eligible for Microsoft's current "It's Not Cheating" offer available online only from http://www.itsnotcheating.com.au/

It looks like it's all pretty much the same as the previous years offer except it appears this year they offer backup CD's as well (I don't know if they did last year, but I never got one if they did). As you probably just guessed, I bought Microsoft Office 2007 last year with Microsoft's first "It's Not Cheating" offer. Basically, you just have to have a valid student email address at any of the participating universities and you are automatically eligible to purchase Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate on a one year subscription basis for $25 at the end of which you can opt to purchase a perpetual license for $50, or straight up you can buy it with a perpetual (lifetime) license for $75.

While I would not consider myself a big Microsoft supporter, if you are like me and have almost no money most of the time, this is definately a great offer and will save you a lot of money. It's probably going to be even more useful this time around than it was last time, as anyone else who bought it the first time they ran this offer would probably have experienced, many universities have not yet upgraded from Office 2003, so everything has to be compatible with 2003.

This is fine since 2007 allows you to save with backwards compatibility, but this is not the default so you have to check it, and occasionally, even when you do save it backwards, things just don't work in 2003 anyway. Additionally, for some subjects, such as ITB004 (Database Systems) in the Faculty of IT at QUT, where you are required to do work in Microsoft Access, the tutorials and lectures all revolve around Access 2003 still. As you may find, Access 2003 and Access 2007 have very, very different interfaces and some of the functionality in 2003 can be a lot more difficult to locate in 2007. Luckily, for students doing this subject, Access 2003 is available for free via Microsoft's Developers Network Academic Association (MSDNAA) and can be installed alongside 2007 without any hiccups.

In all though, I think it is definately a worthwhile purchase, I mean, you save $1075 Australian.

Now how could you pass up on that?

Labels: software, university