Microsoft office home & student keycard.

cepheus

Sorry for my ignorance here, but I notice some software such as Microsoft office home & student comes with a 'keycard'. . Do modern computers have a slot like a hotel key to install this?

What is the point of this, to make sure you can only use it on one computer? This product can retail as low as £40 on Ebay. If thats all what you need is there any disadvantage to buying this? I notice some reports of Argos say the keycards don't work.

santer_2

If you get a PC with Office pre loaded, the key is a piece of card with the number on it if you want to use Office

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/product-key-card-FX101850744.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/videos/video-see-how-the-product-key-card-works-VA102528089.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/using-the-product-key-card-FX101853163.aspx

This would seem to be a better option

http://www.software4students.co.uk/Microsoft_Office_2010_Professional_Plus-details.aspx

John_Gray

A Microsoft Office Key Card is simply a piece of paper with the Product Key (25 alphabetic and numeric characters, in groups of 5) which you have to enter to inform Microsoft that you have a valid licence for Office. Otherwise the use of Office is time- or uses-limited (maybe 30 days or 50 uses).

However many computers you can use it on (usually one or three) is defined by the product key and what variant of Office you bought.

RossDoughty

Just a question but is it Office you must use? There are many free alternatives about that would do just fine .

cepheus

Yes of course, the same as before!

Santer that looks like good value, thought you had to be a student to buy office that cheaply.

Yes I realise there are many alternatives now. Providing they are all compatible and easy to use fair enough. How would they perform with my old Excel spreadsheets and Excel graphs, in fact how would the new Excel cope with them for that matter, is it fully backwards compatible?

John_Gray

cepheus wrote: »

Providing they are all compatible and easy to use fair enough. How would they perform with my old Excel spreadsheets and Excel graphs, in fact how would the new Excel cope with them for that matter, is it fully backwards compatible?

The intention of the developers of Open Office and now LibreOffice is that they should be file-compatible with Microsoft Office.

For straightforward documents and spreadsheets, this is usually the case.

However, you will never know for certain that your particular Word document or Excel spreadsheet works entirely the way you expect in LibreOffice (say) until you try it... (That isn't FUD, but reality!)

paddyrg

^^ Yes, or at least compatible enough that you've nothing to worry about