Hi all, just hoping the power of SDMB can help me here. At uni this coming semester I will be doing work with databases (Access, to be exact). The uni comps, of course, have it installed, and we have some time allocated in lab.
However, I am looking into the options for being able to work at home. Looking online, I can buy Access standalone at $149Au; and then I see the Office 365 product - it appears to be that you actually “rent” the software? It is $89Au per year, would need for 2 years, so more expensive, but maybe more convenient?
My question is: has anyone any experience with Office 365? Does it work OK? Did it muck up anything on your comp when you started it?
Thanks heaps if any one has any thoughts/experiences.
It works just like normal Office. Didn’t muck anything up on my computer. I don’t really know how it would. Generally, you can expect Microsoft’s bread-and-butter software product to not screw up Microsoft’s OSs. The subscription version gives lets you install it easily on multiple (depending on your plan) computers, gives you updates as MS comes out with them every couple months, and gets you 1TB of cloud storage space on Onedrive. It worked really well for me in college this last year, since I could log into my MS account on University computers and then access the same Onedrive location that my personal computer accessed. No messing around with emailing or flash driving projects back and forth.
You should, however, not purchase either of the options you gave, but rather the University subscription, which for $99Au will give you access on two computers, for your two years of Uni and two years afterwards.
Hi Silophant - thank you for that. I obviously completely missed the Uni version! I have been back to the MS website since reading your post, and looked at it. I have MS Office Home and Student 2007 on my comp at present. Is it best to uninstall it?
I teach at a university in California, and our (financially strapped) public university still has free home access for Microsoft Office for all students and staff.
It is provided as a web app, whereby i log in using my faculty ID and password, and i can then run Office programs like Word or Access (as well as a variety of other software) on the university’s server, from my home computer. All my work is saved to my university account, where i have 10GB of storage, and i can sync it with my home computer so that i have local copies of all files at work and at home.
Hi mhendo, no, unfortunately not. The computers, both in the library, and in labs, have all the usual software, and also select specialised software, but it is not accessible to us on our home computers. The system used by your facility sounds fantastic.
