With your e-mail address from the school or university you can register for the free subscription. After graduation the license expires.
Microsoft now offers its Office software free of charge. But not everyone has access to this offer. It applies only to pupils, students and teachers or lecturers.
Office 365 covers beside Word also Excel, Powerpoint, Onenote, Access and Publisher. The Office subscription also includes a terabyte memory (1024 gigabytes) for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service.
The license makes it possible to install the software on up to five computers (Windows and Apple OS X). The mobile version for smartphones and tablets is also available. As long as you belong to an authorized educational institution, you can use the subscription free of charge. All you need is a valid e-mail address from the educational institution such as “xxx@edu.at” and a minimum age of 13.
License expires after completion
Whether you have access to the free subscription from your school or university can easily be clarified on the company’s Office website. A list of partner institutions is not available. All you need to do to identify yourself is enter your e-mail address in the field. The license expires as soon as you have completed your degree.
However, Microsoft’s free campaign is anything but selfless. In the battle for market shares and against free providers, the software pioneer has to assert himself. And the sooner you attract customers’ attention, the longer you can possibly bind them to you. Anyone who comes into contact with Microsoft’s Office at an early stage is likely to use it later in their professional life. Alternatives such as Open Office are definitely more difficult to assert, even if they are permanently free of charge.
Office 2019 is here – you need to know that
Microsoft recently announced the availability of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac in a blog post. In this blog post, we answer the questions most frequently asked by our customers, both from a user perspective and from a technician perspective.
Office 2016 vs. Office 365 vs. Office 2019 vs. Server
First, we need to clarify what we’re talking about. If you have licensed Office 365 (the subscription model), you can use the corresponding online services and regularly receive the latest version of Office programs. From a technical point of view, these Office programs are based on the original Office 2016 (visible by the version number), which has been continuously expanded with new functions and a new splash screen with the addition “Office 365”. However, it is possible that, for example, “Office 2016 Standard” is installed on them. This means that for three years you have only received security updates but no new functions. With Office 2019, you now receive the functions that Office 365 customers can already use. In return, you will have to pay again (once only) – or switch to the Office 365 rental model.
Not to forget the server products available in addition to Office, e.g. SharePoint Server 2019 or Exchange Server 2019, which can be installed and operated in the local IT infrastructure. They will also be published in the coming weeks.
What are the new features?
As I said, Office 2019 includes more or less the new features released with Office 365 since the release of Office 2016. Roughly speaking, these are:
Features for even better looking content (morph & zoom in PowerPoint, support for SVG graphics and new icons, new charts for Excel, drawing with pen in all Office programs).
Better collaboration (access to shared documents and collaborative editing).
New Formula Functions and Analysis Tools (Power Query) in Excel
Focused Inbox in Outlook, which hides automated mails in the inbox.
Read aloud and translation functions in various Office programs
If you want to know more about this, we recommend the following article: “What’s new” on the Microsoft homepage.
What changes for IT technicians?
Office 2016 used MSI as the installation routine. New is the so-called “Click and Go” (Click-to-Run). This enables a better distribution of future security updates and less network traffic. Nevertheless, according to Microsoft, the admin functions will be retained and an in-place update from 2016 to 2019 should be possible.
Do I need to upgrade?
It’s up to you to decide – based on criteria such as compatibility, price, new features, etc. One thing is clear: if you don’t want an Office 365 license, you will sooner or later need an update. And don’t forget: Office 365 licenses make it possible to use the latest Office functions and helpful online services. But nobody forces you to. Neither does this mean that all your data will be automatically transferred to the cloud! To know more about Microsoft Office and its updates have a peek at this site today.
