Most students these days will have an Office 365 account setup at their institution linked to your student e-mail – i.e. john.smith@my-uni.ac.uk.
Figures from Microsoft show that 99.9% of UK universities have signed up for the institution-wide licenses that give free access to the Microsoft Office Suite for free.
How Do I Get It?
Simple – just follow these easy steps.
- Head to the Microsoft Office website.
- Enter your university e-mail address (they call it ‘school’ – how very American ;-). Although to be fair, this does cover a lot of colleges and schools as well! ).
- You’ll be redirected to a login page hosted by your University – this will ask you for your credentials to sign in – i.e. your email (or username) and password that you use for your University email account.
- Upon successful sign in you’re redirected to a page allowing you to download the Microsoft Office suite for free.
Another important thing to note is that this is also available to teachers, lecturers and academics.
But I’m Not A Student / No Longer A Student… 🙁
Sad times, I know – but it couldn’t last forever now could it?
Fear not, the world does not end. You can subscribe to Office 365 for about £8 / month, but in reality – for most people, a free alternative is just a useful and easy to use and in many ways, nearly every bit as powerful as the flagship Microsoft Product.
Our recommendation would be LibreOffice. It’s Microsoft Office without the price tag. I’ve personally been using it for years and despite a few niggly frustrations, it stands up to the test and the job. It’s open source, regularly updated and has an equivalent product for most of the Microsoft Office suite – i.e. Word is Writer, Excel is Calc.
It’s available of Windows, OS X and Linux too – so no matter what your operating system, you can benefit from this truly fantastic piece of open source software!