Oi Geeks! - MS Office licensing question.

[DaiRees]

Right we're having 4 new lappys at work and I need to buy office to put on them. I'm gonna get Office 2010 Home and Business @ £200 each but I notice that there's also a license only "PKC" version (product key card) for about £160 which says it's an OEM version for people who buy a new PC with a trial version of office 2010 pre-installed. The computers we're having have a trial version of office 2007 home and student on them...

So the question is can I buy one of the retail packs to get a set of discs and then 3 of the PKC ones?

OR, can I buy 4 PKC versions and download the software?

OR do I have to buy 4 retail packs?

[mandelbug]

Buy home and student through the trial (about £100 from memory) and then you will get a free upgrade to 2010 when it's out on the shelf in the next month i believe it is

[DaiRees]

Nah it's for the company mate, we're not eligable to have home and student. Besides we need outlook.

[swiss]

http://www.openoffice.org/

[steve_earwig]

Open Office have Outlook?

Come on Dai, bend over for Uncle Bill

[swiss]

Lord knows he needs every penny

[DaiRees]

Come on Dai, bend over for Uncle Bill

Yeah tell me about it! So much for all the support for small businesses eh? Also we're not eligible to get educational licenses even though we're a training company . On a lighter note you can get office 2007 home and student for about £60 for 3 licenses these days, so the private user is well looked after

Anyway, anyone help with the original question?

[StevieboyTD]

Grab an install from www.getmicrosoftoffice.com and see if it will install as the demo...

If it does then you could use the key only type.

[sirwiggum]

If you open an IMAP port on the Exchange Server you can use Mozilla Thunderbird to check your emails.

Worked for me on the corporate Exchange Server using a Linux Workstation

OpenOffice.org is a very good alternative to MS Office. Another alternative is Lotus Symphony, which is built on OpenOffice.org but has a slightly more Office-y tabbed interface:

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotu ... e.nsf/home

Be careful with Home licensing of MS Office, it may not cover company use. You may wish to get an Enterprise licence which will allow you to install on multiple machines with a single key.

[mjb]

I vastly prefer using openorifice to ms orifice... Especially now they've gone and put all that crap at the top of the windows...

[StevieboyTD]

I vastly prefer using openorifice to ms orifice... Especially now they've gone and put all that crap at the top of the windows...

heh, would you believe it took me a while to find the "Print" function when i first used the newer versions......

[sirwiggum]

I vastly prefer using openorifice to ms orifice... Especially now they've gone and put all that crap at the top of the windows...

Agree totally.

The users are used to the menus and toolbar icons on -> 2003. Then, totally against user interface consistency guidelines, Microsoft decides to change the UI in order to sell what is basically the same office suite. They also changed the file format, forcing users to upgrade to read / edit documents!

It would be like everybody being happy with their 406s, and Peugeot deciding to mount the steering controls along the top of the dashboard, and then change the roads such that everybody has to upgrade to a 407 to drive on roads that have been resurfaced, and using these as selling points. The company car drivers don't really care, take a couple of weeks to retrain in the new top-of-dashboard controls, and drive on the newly surfaced roads. The rest of us curse under our breath when we are stopped from using a x07-only road / .docx file.