What office package for uni?

Chives

Chives

Chives

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Hi guys,

I ordered a MacBook Air last week for Uni and it is on its way as I speak.

Question is what office package do I want to be buying for it? I've seen Office 365 University floating around for a decent-ish price.
What would you guys recommend? Cheers :)
 
I can't really advise about any particular Microsoft Office suite but have you considered using Libre Office?

http://www.libreoffice.org/

I use it at work and I have it installed on my Mac at home. It seems to be able to open all the common Microsoft Office documents and spreadsheets, I've found there's very little it can't do.
 
Office for sure. Even if the other companies offerings allow you to open and save office formats using the defacto standard will make it a lot easier if you ever need help from friends/partners/lecturers with a feature.

Your university may also provide free/discounted copies of office as well so worth waiting until you get there (or searching now) to see if they do.
 
I'm using the 2011 version of office still on my mac which does everything that I want and need it to. Pages is pretty good still, even though it was released in 2009 (!), but you WILL encounter formatting errors if you keep switching .docx files between office and pages software. Becomes an absolute nightmare if your institution also uses the older version of office which can only support .doc files...

Get office 365 if you can, or 2011 at the very least!
 
most education places will have a deal setup for their students to give the software at a discount rate.

We offer MS office for a tenner or even free if their a computer student, it may be worth holding fire until you speak to them.
 
Chives said:
Question is what office package do I want to be buying for it? I've seen Office 365 University floating around for a decent-ish price.
Click to expand...

It's a very good price. For me, I'll be using Office to minimise any problems I could encounter, as they use the very latest of MS's Office suite for absolutely EVERYTHING.
 
Tunney said:
Another vote for Office. You should be able to get it for a decent price as a uni student.
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I thought Office might be the way to go. I managed to get Office 365 University today for £59 which I consider to be a good deal I think
James J said:
I'm using the 2011 version of office still on my mac which does everything that I want and need it to. Pages is pretty good still, even though it was released in 2009 (!), but you WILL encounter formatting errors if you keep switching .docx files between office and pages software. Becomes an absolute nightmare if your institution also uses the older version of office which can only support .doc files...

Get office 365 if you can, or 2011 at the very least!
Click to expand...

I feared this might be the case, and I do have a feeling that my University uses older versions of Office unfortunately.

Amp34 said:
Office for sure. Even if the other companies offerings allow you to open and save office formats using the defacto standard will make it a lot easier if you ever need help from friends/partners/lecturers with a feature.

Your university may also provide free/discounted copies of office as well so worth waiting until you get there (or searching now) to see if they do.
Click to expand...

Ooops I didn't think about this before I went and bought it today! Ah well at least I didn't pay too much for it :)
 
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Depends what you are trying to do really...is word, powerpoint or excel the key app. Do you need the flexibility of all of them?

Try open office and then expand into slightly more specialist programs from there.
 
It rather depends on what you need from an Office Suite.

For example I find Open Office's version of Calc (Excel) useless compared to Libre Office's version. There have been several things missing from Open that Libre has that I've needed for work. For 1 I believe Libre's version has considerably more options when it comes to conditional formatting.

But if you just need a word processor then I doubt there is much of a difference between the two, though I seem to find that Libre's keyboard shortcuts match up better with what I was used to using in Excel, so that made it slightly easier to migrate to.
 
Guess I'll give OpenOffice a shot. I don't specifically need it for anything really, just feel like it's nice to have installed.
 
If you're doing a Science/math based degree you might be eligible for Dreamspark. It gives you a lot of free copies. When I was doing Engineering I managed to get windows 8, 7, xp and Office 2007. They had over a 100 other things too.
 
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I'll go out there and say that even though it is comparatively poor value, if you just want a basic word processor that gives you all of the basic features you'd ever require, Pages is great. However, if you don't feel it is any easier to use than Word and you can get Word very cheaply, of course Pages isn't a great choice.
 
I see you've bought an Office 365 subscription now, but bear in mind that Office 2011 is still the most current version of Office for Macs so that's all you get when you install Office 365 on your mac. On a PC, Office 365 installs 2013 as its the most current version for Windows.

Many people get confused and think that Office 365 is an actual new office product, whereas it's just the name of Microsoft's cloud-based Office subscription package.
 
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