Where is the cheapest and best place to get Microsoft Office?
 

I am needing Microsoft Office that has Word, Excel, Power Point, etc. all included. I found on Microsoft.com that it is $149. Surely there has to be a cheaper deal that that.
Also I have seen there is a Microsoft Office 365. It is only like $35.00 and comes with more than just the main 3 programs.
I am not sure which to purchase and why a person would purchase one over the other. Trying to make the best purchase.

Office online is free, you just have to create a Microsoft account. It's the web versions of the apps, but mostly fully functional.

If you want the physical apps, you have to go with O365, which is $99/year.

Do you know anyone who is a student or teacher and has a school email address?
Check here to see if their school qualifies for free Office. There's also a link there, "Not Eligible? See More Options" that will get you office 365 Personal (1 user) for $69.99/year.


https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/students

I work for a college so I will have to check into that.

Hope it works out for you.

I pay $1 a week for O365 on 5 devices because it was easier than proving the teacher discount fo $100 for the retail version. Can cancel at any time.

Google docs or libreOffice If your running Linux.

That is such highway fkn robbery.

That's why I'm still using an older version of Office on my home PCs. I think I paid like $70 for a three seat license, from Microsoft.

That would be my first recommendation but some people have to have Office for compatibility reasons.

I use Apple's suite (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) and I never have any issues. Also don't have to pay MS for their bullshit.

Yeah, getting away without using M$ Office is a neat trick if you can do it. But most need it. For me, Excel alone is well worth the money. Too, though those alternatives named here are often adequate they aren't as smooth or as seamlessly integrated as M$. Apple is fine but 95% of the world uses M$ for business and it then becomes a pain in the ass.

Other than some bullshit that I hate like VLOOKUP, I can do everything I need to do in Numbers and save it in Excel format for other people to use.

I actually prefer the Apple suite, it's more user friendly. Imagine that. :D

Don’t you blaspheme cowboy!

Who doesn’t love VLOOKUP? What kind of heathen are you?

Like Vail, my world runs through excel and it’s worth the money.

If I were in a different industry it would probably be google docs.

It's my own damn fault. I made the conscious decision to trade in Visio for Excel. :D

That’s fair.

Just gotta sling some shit. ROFL

We’re running dork smack up in here. :LOL:

:thumb:

$9.95 a month for Office 365

After MS Office moved to a subscription service, I finally made the switch to OpenOffice.

Highway robbery.

Eh, that's a family license ($69/year for just one), and it comes with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. You'll pay more than that just for Dropbox for the same amount of storage.

This. Google "office", aka "Workspace" is free. Open Chrome browser, click on Google Apps icon on top right, choose Docs, or Sheets, or Slides, etc. Anymore it is as ubiquitous as M$ Office in the workplace, and moreso in startups & education fields.

While this is serviceable for the lightest users, it is a fail for any heavy duty and frequent user.

There isn't a snowballs chance in hell your using Google's office suite for complex Excel tasks or creating a PPT for a presentation.

Open Office isn't much better. :shake:

Google for enterprise is getting much closer. I know a lot of Fortune 100 companies that are switching. The savings can be in the millions of dollars.

I've never used Enterprise version so I won't comment but I'm guessing it's more like Office than Sun's OpenOffice or Googles free stuff. :hmmm:

Agreed, Google shared docs are excellent for collaborating remotely on excel and ppt. They aren't a replacement for M$ though. I always have to convert final copy of Google shared docs to M$ docs.

Interesting. Any guess on what the security is like on G enterprise? How does it make sense to run Windows but not Office in terms of cost, security, and administration?

I can't go into too much detail but for most companies, it's good enough.

For government contracts, there's all kinds of compliance issues so special negotiations are required with Google to make sure instances stay on-shore, aren't accessible by foreign nationals, and comply with certain government security requirements like FISMA, GARM, and ITAR.

Like I said, I know a lot of Fortune 100 companies are switching, including mine.

By the way, if I had to guess, Windows in the enterprise will soon be headed the same way. I see a lot of companies going to alternate solutions. You could see enterprise Chromebooks in the next few years.

The cost differential is just huge. A Chromebook you could literally throw away and replace if it broke. Windows PC's are 10x more costly to support, secure, and admin.

Thanks, good information. It will be interesting to see if G can give M$ the first real competition they’ve had in the office suite space at the enterprise level.

It's all about the costs, honestly.

You know how it is with publicly-traded companies.

This is a perfect example of how competition in the free marketplace drives innovation and improvements. I imagine the corporate IT trend toward lightly managed devices to replace the more expensive PC is a response to the cost factors you cite here.

Yeah, in the past few years I've garnered a reputation in my company for certain types of things and it's led to me working on some massive projects (hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars) and in my new job, one of my primary duties is looking at costs and finding ways to cut them.

For a large enterprise, we're literally talking 10's of millions of dollars in savings when you figure in hardware, licensing, maintenance, security, and support. It's significant enough to shake up the market significantly.

That being said, I work on fed gov a lot and they still use MS. Money is no object for them. ;)

$43.00


https://www.g2deal.com/microsoft-off...ebb471#EDMonly

:thumb: Well done.

The problem is that Microsoft had a 25-year head start on developing all of their software, so it's super tough for others to catch up. If your needs are pretty basic, Google or Open Office work fine. I can't imagine trying to do my work in anything other than Word, PowerPoint or Excel, though. There's just too much missing in other options.

I'd much rather use the free Microsoft stuff than the other options, personally.

Same here. It’s not just that they dominate the field and their product is needed if you want to be compatible with everyone else. It’s also that their products are so damn good. Excel is one of the, if not the, most robust business and academic tools ever created.

That gap is closing.

Believe it or not, one of the big drivers right now is collaboration.

Sharepoint + Office is a freaking disaster. Overwrites, lockouts, version control, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

Google Docs just plain work. You can have 3 or 4 people editing the same doc in real time and no issues.

Oh and speaking of collaboration, MS Teams is ****ing awful.

This is an overstatement.

There is lag and latency on Google Docs unless your entire team is on a T-4 superspeed pipeline

Not true.

There are enterprises out there with 40K home office workers using Google docs because Sharepoint simply doesn't work with that kind of setup.

And for the record, I personally HATE Google. I'm an Apple guy myself.

But professionally, I've seen what works and what doesn't. Google is rapidly closing the gap and Microsoft is pricing itself right out of the marketplace.

Actually, Teams has been a lifesaver for us. It's worked very well, after a few initial hiccups. We use it constantly.

Same. Ditto for SharePoint/OneDrive, though we do have weird conflicts from time to time. Not near enough to be a major problem, though.

We've dumped our entire file server at this point, and it's been fine.

It does help that we're a small office of relatively tech savvy folks, so it's easy to train people on where to find stuff. That would be considerably more difficult with a ton of people, some of whom should be featured on those Progressive commercials.

You may (or may not) be shocked to know how many tech-dumb people work for tech companies. It's pretty crazy to see some of the questions that come across our support channels. Basic stuff that most professionals should know, tech or not.

So yeah, scale of the operation has a lot to do with it. In a large organization, MS has a lot of issues. It just doesn't scale well.

Excel was created right as I got out of college and I got assigned to learn it in my first job. It's been my main work tool (along with Word) for over 30 years now. It's kind of amazing to think about.

Interesting.

We use primarily WebEx and Bluejeans but also have experience with Teams, Zoom, GoTo, and several others.

Teams hardly ever works well enough. WebEx tends to be the most reliable. We've moved several Teams installations to other platforms.

I don’t doubt it. Nobody ever got rich betting against Google.

Wow. That puts it into perspective. It would be cool if there were a way to calculate how much more productive you were over that time period with Excel than if you had been without it.

I used Teams with a fortune 100 company who had all employees other than essential working from home. Once set up properly, worked great.

To be fair, mom and dad are the folks that should be in the Progressive commercials and we dumped our server years ago. It’s Dropbox, but on the functional side it’s way easier to use than a server.

SharePoint is a dog. LMAO

A 3-legged one at that.

I bought a student license off ebay a couple weeks ago for $29. It used to be that you could get one for like $6, but O365 put the kabosh on that.

Apple closing down their own versions (a long time ago, now) certainly didn't help with variety.

?

Apple still has their own versions. I use them every day.

10 yrs ago I had almost our entire company of a couple thousand people all using thin clients. We have gotten quite a bit larger now and have a "desktop" team and they convinced the highers up to go back to Windows. I tried to tell them there is no reason to do that when we run VDI but what do I know, I am just a dumb sysadmin turned exec. idiots

Yep.

The most forward-thinking organizations are looking at Chromebooks now. It's like VDI, only without the capital infrastructure. You just buy the service from Google and away you go.

I actually tested out using ChromeBooks this past year to try do that and we ran into a couple of issues that we couldn't overcome at the time. Don't really remember what they were now but I think remote support was one issue.

With us using VDI I see no reason to spend 1k-1200K for Windows PC with all the software shit you have to put it on it to admin etc when i was doing thin clients for $300-400 each.

The overhead on Windows PC's is WAY more than the cost of the PC. Licensing, management and security software, support, etc. Microsoft is literally riding the "they've used Windows so long, they can't change" train. Most companies don't want to risk it.

There's on old saying in the infrastructure business:

"Nobody ever gets fired for selecting Microsoft, IBM, or Cisco."

lol I tried to tell them the exact same thing. They just don't get it..whatever

My original post wasn't clear at all, so my apologies. Apple kept closing down versions rather than keeping the old line alive while taking a new approach with a different line. When you add that to the drive to make it all compatible, to at least some extent, with Microsoft, it limited the variety.

Will that model support security that includes RSA tokens?

No idea. I've never deployed them, just know of companies that are evaluating them.

Thanks. The way things are today, with China’s active espionage and malicious intrusion threats 24/7 from across the globe, security is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about computing solutions that access the network remotely.

Thin clients are actually a lot more secure in the sense that it's much easier to avoid executing code on them, and in some cases, it's impossible depending on the OS.

Purpose-built devices tend to be much more secure while less tightly-couple hardware and software (e.g. Windows PC's and Android devices) tend to be a lot more vulnerable.

With COVID, I know of companies that have 10's of thousands of remote employees working on PC's, including my own. A lot of them have abandoned hardware tokens in favor of soft tokens on smart phones and things like that.

I’m not thinking resting data so much as maliciously accessing the network, if that makes sense. As you can tell I’m asking from the end-user perspective. RSA tokens have been on smart devices for some time now. DOD companies use them on laptops, even they have sent many thousands of their workers to work from home, except for those who need to work onsite in a secured facility.

I'm pretty spoiled. My position provides me with downloads of almost all Microsoft apps on all platforms, every single Adobe app(all platforms), the entire Google suite, Unlimited storage on Google, Unlimited storage on Box.com, 50GB on MEGA, 1TB on OneDrive, 1TB Dropbox, and a personal Furk.net subscription.

Any friends here need any software, I can probably find a way to help you out... PM me..

Teams kicks ass at our business. Outside of a few hiccups with sharing files to external people it works great. And I would say 70% of the businesses we work with are using it as well.

We used Teams and had very little issues and they were quickly corrected.

Ghosting when using backgrounds was my biggest gripe.

Yeah, 2-factor auth is the biggest preventative to unauthorized access, used in conjunction with a VPN.

The thing about thin clients is that the device itself is less of a staging area for network-based attacks. Windows machines are usually the source of 3/4 of all attacks on an internal network.

Interestingly enough, the worst experiences I've had with Teams are using it to collaborate with Microsoft themselves. Perhaps they're just not very good at using their own software.

That's an issue with most of them, unfortunately. With transmission delay, camera resolution, and the protocols involved, we've still got a ways to go before it's broadcast quality.

Returning to this, Microsoft 365 is a no brainer if you have people you want to share your subscription with. I finally decided to migrate from Dropbox. I hadn't realized that you get SIX accounts for $100/year, and those six accounts can each install it on 5 devices. Granted most people won't actually install it that many places, but in theory that's 30 installs of Office and 6TB of storage for $100.

I've shared it with my brother, parents, and grandparents who all had Dropbox subscriptions. As a group, we all just got a discount of $300 a year and got Office for free.

That's actually a great deal.

We're prepping for a Gmail / G Suite transition next weekend. 140K people moving off of MS, at least for the time being.

Some interesting stats out today from IDC...

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/17...old-macs-2020/

It's from MacRumors so the headline is about Chrome OS outpacing MacOS but the real story here is the top line in the graph. It's obvious Google is making headway.

https://images.macrumors.com/t/rIpGf...arketshare.png

So did this guy ever get advice on where to purchase the product he asked about? It seems more like 101 reasons to not use Microsoft Office.

Is Chrome an OS?

I mean think about it

Yeah, it's based on Gentoo Linux.

Just got this with my new work tablet. Pretty cheap.

I once bought a CLONED MS Office version bootleg and it worked for about 3-4 months until an update and then it was all screwed up and I went to Office 365.

Never have to buy updates or worry about the latest or greatest.

Another interesting tangent...

Microsoft plans on releasing Microsoft Office 2021 later this year. Yep, they're going to sell standalone versions of Office again.