Microsoft Office Question

[Nawlins]

Why doesn't Microsoft sell the programs in the Office Suite individually as well as together? I'm a college student, and could really use Word on my Powerbook (12", 1st generation; AppleWorks sucks), but I don't want to spend $150 for 1 program. I wouldn't really need any of the other programs except PowerPoint, but I have Keynote, so I wouldn't use PowerPoint if I got it.

The only thing that could worse than not having adequate word processing software on Macs would be to pay $150 for 1 program I'd use a lot and 4 I'd never use.

Alex

 

[Nawlins]

Just found out I can buy Microsoft Word by itself for $200. This doesn't make any sense. They want too much money either way for a single program.

 

[yoda13]

I sympathize with your problem. I paid the price for the educatin grouping of programs myself and have never used anything but Word. Have you looked into Appleworks? It is only 80 dollars and works nearly as well as Word for the casual user. There are also some free options out there as well as some cheap alternatives that look pretty good and are compatible with Word. You should look in this month's issue of MacHome as they review just such a program and I believe it was half the price of Appleworks and could do all the stuff word does and is compatible with it. Don't quote me on the price, but you might check it out.

 

[grapes911]

check to see if your school has a deal with ms. At the university of Delaware I can get office (for windows or os x) for just 79.99.

 

[uhlawboi80]

harass your school to enter into one of those evil M$ software programs. Here at the law center and at my undergrad school A&M (and i know UT) the schools enter an agreement and pay a fee (not alot) and get to sell the software to students for like 5$ for each CD.

i got MS office for Mac for 5$ and could get windows NT or XP or 2k for 5 dollars (not that they are really worth 5$ )

 

[mrjamin]

OpenOffice - completely free yet completely priceless

You need x11 to run it

There are a few compatibility issues but i've not really had many problems at all. give it a whirl and see how you get on

 

[solvs]

If you're a college student, you can get Word/Office for around $100. Look around. Cheaper than Non-Edu Word alone. Edu AppleWorks is $40 at Apple. There are alternatives, but most of them are pretty slow and not so good, IMO. Go to someplace like www.academicsuperstore.com for some good deals.

 

[Powerbook G5]

I've only found the Windows version for $100, as far as the Mac version, I bought it at CompUSA for $140 since it was the cheapest I've seen it since the $99 deal Amazon had back when they were updated. I wish I had gotten it then, but I didn't have OS X back then. I too don't understand the pricing since it costs $130 in some places for just Word or $140 for the whole Office suite. It seems odd they would price it $10 more. All I wanted was Word, also, but what can you do. What really sucks is that once you install Office, it sets IE as default instead of Safari and Entourage instead of Mail, etc. It was a real pain since I had never used OS X and was trying to figure out why everything was launching the wrong program even though I set Safari, Mail, address book, and all as default.