office 365

365 is a subscription service - monthly fee you get latest office, 5 machines, lots of cloud apps. Great for corp offices. Adobe is doing the same thing with Photoshop/Illustrator etc.

If the computer is brand new, you could get 2013 Office Student for 120ish dollars, but it's a 1 shot / 1 computer licence key. If you buy another computer, need a new office key (for another 120ish bucks).

If you have multiple computers, getting 1 365 subscription and using it for all your computers might be a cheaper option.

I know all the supposed positives about in the cloud stuff but some other things to think about as well.

Do you know who can is or will be able to read whatever it is you're storing "in the cloud"? In the cloud resides somewhere. Yeah, this doesn't bother a lot of people but it's something to think about in any case. Remember what google is doing with email? They're reading your email's data with spiders to figure out what ads to put on your pages. Don't like it? Tough, that brings us to the next point.

If you store everything in the cloud, you MUST accept a new EULA in order to even access your data. They can change the agreement on you at any time and you're stuck having to agree to it before you can even get back to your stuff.

If you're happy with the way things work and a new version is pushed out, it's likely you will be made to download the new version before you can get at your stuff. If you don't want to update, if the update crashes on your particular computer, if you don't agree with the new version's way of doing things and want to go back, tough noogies.


In a sentence you're forever going to do things exactly how the company wants you to do things and you must change your ways to accommodate the software's way of doing things rather than making the computer work the way you want to work.

I already use Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive for various storage-- I have no issues with it. They are great services.

Office 365 is great and you can get student versions of it.

Alternatively, you can use Google docs which are cloud-based versions of office-like apps. You can access documents and edit off-line using Chrome browser. These are free and might be good enough for her school purposed. My kids in school often used google docs.

Edited by jennifer_runs 2014-05-01 11:22 AM