Microsoft Office packages

[Alfee]

I'll be going to university in September so I'll probably need office for Word and Excel. I've found a great website (Software4Students) that does the standard Office package for �35, but for just �11 more you can get Professional Plus and for �22 more you can get Enterprise. These give you far more applications that the 4 basic programs, but will they be useful to a student or just clutter up my laptop?

I've tried to read what they do ,but don't really see how I'd ever use them. The one which might be useful is One Note, but I've never used it before and its only included with Enterprise. Is it worth buying the extras or should I just stick with Standard? Or i could buy Standard and buy One Note for �13. If you've got any experience with these packages, let me know what you think.

[dabees]

Don't bother with Microsoft, open office will do the same for free.

http://www.openoffice.org/

[Lil O'lady]

Absolutely endorse the above. No need to invest in Office at all.

[mjwman]

Another agreement. I was concerned at first but it comes from Sun Corp that do the Java software we all use. I have had no problems in use and it is fully compatible with Microsoft documents.

[Alfee]

Thanks for the recommendation. I will download it and have a look.

However, it doesn't seem to contain a program similar to Outlook. What do you do for email and diary?

[rojash]

For e-mail you can use Thunderbird, brought to you by the wonderful people who gave us Firefox (both of which are free).

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thun derbird/

Use the Thunderbird Lightning extension for your diary:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

[rojash]

Sorry, you'll have to copy and paste that second link into your address bar, as AB doesn't recognise the https protocol.