As of December 2nd  if you’re a student in a qualifying academic institution you can get Office 2013 ProPlus for free! Wait… There must be a catch? There’s no such thing as a free lunch!. Well with Microsoft’s new “Student Advantage” programme there is and it enables any academic institution which licenses Office 365 or Office Professional for staff and students (which I would imagine most Irish schools do) to provide Office 365 ProPlus to its students as well – free gratis! And it’s not a limited version either,  the entire suite can be installed , Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, and Access, and to boot the license covers up to five devices.

Microsoft made its Office 365 cloud-based suite free for education two years back and currently somewhere in the region of 110 million students and staff are using the cloud based suite, but now with ProPlus in addition to the cloud productivity and collaboration tools (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and web app versions of Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel) they get the full and familiar suite available offline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ESr0cRAqnI

To find out more and to check edibility visit the Microsoft Education Portal, more than 35,000 institutions are automatically eligible worldwide so there’s a good chance yours is too!