LAWTECH GURU BLOG by Jeff Beard

Law Students: Grab Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for Only $60

While Microsoft has long offered the discounted Home/Student version of Office, this offer is probably their best yet for qualified students. Microsoft is offering Office Ultimate 2007 (their top Office suite package) for only $59.95, which includes:

• Access 2007
• Accounting Express 2007
• Excel 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• Groove 2007
• OneNote 2007
• Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• PowerPoint 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Word 2007

I've blogged about some of the refinements in the Office 2007 Professional suite. One of the key additions in the Utimate suite is OneNote 2007. I've tested its improvements firsthand and they are impressive, particularly the web research clipping and search enhancements -- including searching for text within downloaded images, very slick. OneNote just gets better with each release. It also comes with a sample notebook designed to be a very easy-to-follow tutorial. Given that OneNote itself costs $100, this is indeed a steal. FYI, while the MS OneNote web page has a number of canned demos, the most useful one I've seen is this recorded webcast: OneNote 2007 Tips and Tricks: Personal Usage and Collaboration.

Microsoft is smart to expose future business leaders to their new suite. The offer is good through April 30, 2008, with more details at Microsoft's Ultimate Steal web site and their Education web page. This is probably as close to free that Microsoft has gotten with a brand new Office suite, and it's a very complete suite to boot.