I have just bought my granddaughter a laptop for her university work, but it does not have Microsoft Office. I want to know which edition of Office I should buy to put on two laptops. I want to make sure they are for continuous use and will be eligible for upgrades as they are released. Any other advice such as cost and the best place to buy would be very helpful. Desperate grandmother of Brighton

Some universities recommend specific software for their courses, and some have deals with Microsoft and other suppliers that enable them to offer programs at low cost. Ideally, your granddaughter will have this information already. If she’s doing a course that requires specialised software, it’s worth checking. If Microsoft Office is a general requirement, it may not be worth the effort.

For students, the simplest, cheapest, and most powerful option is Microsoft Office 365 University, which she can buy online. It’s a fantastic deal. It bundles together the main Office applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote plus, for Windows users, Outlook, Publisher and Access – with a terabyte (TB) of cloud storage for four years, all for only £59.99.

Microsoft Office 365 University will enable your granddaughter to run Office on two Windows PCs, Macs or tablets, and two smartphones. The tablets can be running Windows, Android or Apple iOS. Check online to see which operating systems are supported – Windows XP and Vista are not.

The Office 365 University programs get updated and upgraded free, via an internet connection. But if smartphones are updated over the mobile phone network (instead of Wi-Fi), the network operator may charge for the data transfer.

Of course, your granddaughter will have to prove that she is eligible for Office 365 University. Usually this means having a confirmed email address from a recognised university or college. This is why you can’t buy it on her behalf.

The free online storage is valuable – 1TB would usually cost £6.60 to £10 per month, or around £320 over four years. Please encourage your granddaughter to use it to back up all her files. There’s never a shortage of sob stories from university students who have lost several years’ work, or the sole copy of their PhD thesis, when their laptop was stolen or the hard drive failed.

One catch is that the 1TB of cloud storage expires with the Office 365 subscription. At this point, users are left with just 15GB of free storage in OneDrive. If they have used more, they can download and delete any files they don’t want to keep online, or switch to Office 365 Personal. This includes 1TB of free storage for £59.99 per year.

Four years is enough for most students to complete their degrees and/or other courses. If they need more time, Microsoft allows students to buy a second copy of Office 365 University after three years.

Office 365 University is also available in the USA, where it costs $79.99 (£50.79) for four years. In European countries such as France, Germany and Italy, it costs €79 (£57) for four years. Check the web or the online Microsoft Store for details for these and other countries.

Given the very high cost of attending university nowadays, it would be very silly to risk compromising her work for the sake of £15 or €20 per year.

Office for the rest of us

Microsoft Office 365 University will run on two desktops or laptops, so that may answer your question. However, your granddaughter only seems to have one laptop, so I wonder if the second copy is for you …

Both Office 365 University and Office 365 Personal, mentioned above, are for individuals. If you want a version that can be used by two or more people at once, the best option is Office 365 Home. This allows five people to use Office 365 on PCs, tablets and smartphones, and each user gets 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage.

At £79.99 per year, Office 365 Home is much better value for a typical family than Office 365 Personal at £59.99 per year. However, even if five students club together for 365 Home, it’s still cheaper – and, I think, better – for them to buy their own subscription to Microsoft Office 365 University.

Otherwise, the cheapest way to acquire Office 365 Home is to get a year’s free use with a new tablet or laptop. This includes some Windows 8.1 tablets priced at £79.99 to £99.99, or even less. The obvious drawback is that you have to pay for the second and subsequent years, which is not the case with software that you buy rather than rent.

On the other hand, everyone can use Office for free nowadays, because there are versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and OneDrive online as part of the Outlook.com (and Hotmail) email services. Obviously these are not full-featured versions – and you can’t download them for offline use, as you can with Office 365 programs – but they do the job for people who don’t need complex features. Also, they’re much more “Microsoft Office compatible” than free alternatives such as the open source LibreOffice or the closed, proprietary Google Docs.

Buying not renting

Companies that provide software (Microsoft, Adobe etc) and data (Netflix, Spotify etc) are moving from sales to subscription models, which are cheaper in the short term but more expensive in the long term. However, Microsoft still sells standalone copies of Microsoft Office and, indeed, separate copies of Office programs such as Microsoft Word.

In this case, you could buy your granddaughter a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2013 from Amazon.co.uk for £94.98. This does not include a DVD. It comes as a Product Key Card (PKC) with instructions to download and activate Office. This will keep working “forever” on one PC, and can be moved to another PC in the event of hardware failure.

The drawbacks are that it only works on one PC not two, and it doesn’t include any extra Office programs (Outlook, Publisher, Access) or tablet and smartphone versions. Further, it doesn’t include 1TB of cloud storage, or a free upgrade to the next version of Office.

Office Home and Student 2013 is good value, as it stands, but not as good as Microsoft Office 365 University.

Microsoft usually supports software for 10 years, and support for Office Home and Student 2013 will end on 11 April, 2023. It will still work after this date, of course, but it will no longer get security patches.

UPDATE: Microsoft UK says that students can get the full Office 365 free if their school or university has a site-licensing agreement, and that “most universities in the UK are part of the scheme”. Students can find out if they qualify by going to Office 365 and clicking the green “Find out if you’re eligible” button.

If the school or university does not have a site-licensing agreement, students can still get Office 365 “entirely free”. Microsoft says that Office 365 Education E1 “is available to any bona fide UK institution and their students”: the school just needs to contact Microsoft via the website. The E1 deal only provides access to the full online version of Office, not the one that you can download and install. However, students still get the free 1TB of cloud storage and a 50GB email inbox.



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