Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition--for purchase with PC Hardware only, 3 Users (PC)

This is a licence for a three computer version of
- Wordprocessor - Word;
- Spreadsheet - Excel;
- Presentation Manager - PowerPoint; &
- Note recorder OneNote

In the box, you get one set of installation files on a DVD, and one licence code that can be registered for three computers in the same home.

Called a Home & Student edition, you do not need to have a student in your home in order to legally use this product, but there is a restriction - you are not allowed to use this product for any business reasons. So if you run a business from home this is NOT for you. - Microsoft market an Office Small Business Edition which comes with extra features and web help for small business users.

However, if you just want something to write letters; write notes; and, do the family finances at home, this is a sensible and cheap solution which makes Microsoft Works almost pointless.

An obvious thought here - there aren't many non-commercial reasons to use PowerPoint at home other than for kids homework so why include it? Publisher (used for writing Newsletters and very popular among churches) or the database program Access (although difficult to learn) would have been of more use, whilst the loss of Office Outlook (not to be confused with Outlook Express) is annoying if you already use an older version as your e-mail system.

Note however that Office 2007 only works with Windows XP or Vista, so computers running Windows 95, 98 or ME can NOT run this product.

With a new version, one expects improvements and in this case there are many. The most obvious being the new menu system which takes a bit of getting used to but needs to be learnt as this will be the future.

You get Word, Excel & PowerPoint as in previous versions but not Outline and do not get (in the box atleast)a cheaper upgrade to other useful programs such as Publisher and Access (in previous versions this was an option).

In place you get OneNote - and this is an advantage as it is an excellent new product for writing notes in some sort of order (the program takes words and pictures) and excels at copying words and images off webpages such as an invoice. This program is very useful and worth experimenting with as it is a genuine new approach to storing information.

Worth it? Yes because for three licences, this is cheap, and it is an excellent product that the world uses. If you have kids, then they will need to be able to use this by the time they start work.

If your prime purchase is for your children, then while the above is true, it may be worth changing to this version at the same time as your children's school does - it makes the learning curve of the new interface easier and makes working on files both at school and home easier. Note: schools often change major software such as this during the Summer Holidays - school IT staff do not get the same long holidays as the children.

Faults?

1. No ability to cheaply add on other Microsoft Office products such as Publisher or Access which many students or home users would want;

2. Documents are saved by default as ".docx" and not ".doc" (and also in Excel ".xlsx" etc.) This is a problem if you send a document by e-mail to someone else as their computer can probably not read your .docx file, so you need to either "save as" as a .doc for this document or alter (in options) the default setting to always save as a .doc file. - Easy but annoying.

3. At the top of the window of each application instead of saying "Document 1 - Microsoft Word", it says "Document 1 - Microsoft Word non-commercial use" (or Excel etc.) in this version. This looks naff, and is not easy to remove.

4. The new layout of menus and buttons at the top of each program is a pain to re-learn, but as I said earlier, this will be the future so one needs to bite the bullet on this one at some stage.

Installation Tip: Remove all old versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote before installing this new version, by doing this your registry and hard drive will have less in them and work faster. Remember, you can leave applications such as Outlook and Access 2003 on your computer, to run alongside your Office 2007 applications.

I work at Oxford university and get Office 2007/2003/XP etc.. free via educational licences, but I choose to stay with Office 2003 Professional. As mentioned by other reviewers Office 2007 is a bit of a pain in the positrons compared to just about all other versions of MS Office that keep to the same basic menu and file format. It takes you 5 minutes just to work out how to load a word document with the new interface, gorgeous though it is. I run many networked PCs at home and at work, and casual users who are Office 2003 savvy don't take kindly when this new 2007 interface pops up. Worst still, almost unforgivable even, is that a Professional version of Office 2007 Student is no longer offered, when even secondary school kids need Access and Publisher as part of the GSCE in IT. Plus no Outlook either. So, great software as Excel, Word and PowerPoint is, this loses Office Student two stars in my book. Another downside is that many schools are likely to stay with 2003, making it hard for the kids to adapt to two interfaces and file formats at home and school. For similar reasons [compatibility] all our new Vista PCs have been reformatted back to XP Pro.

However if you have a schoolkid/student in the house and their academic institution [i.e. School or College] is on the participating list, and most will be, you can pick up the full Office Professional 2007 for them for just £45 [incl postage] via any Microsoft educational software partner. With Office Pro you get Access/Publisher/Outlook as well, for about the price of this cut-down Office Home & Student. If the kids might need OneNote as well then go for top of the range Office Enterprise 2007 for just £55 [there's even Wacom 'educational use' graphics stylus/tablets on offer]. Try for instance Microsoft Partner www.Software4Students.co.uk: you just select the school and input your kids name [who must be on the role-call and live at the delivery address], buy the software and the bare CD/wallet appears in the post. The rather natty CD/DVD is emblazoned with Microsoft holograms and the text 'Licensed by student and facility only'. Likewise you can buy your kids the superb Encarta Premium enhanced Student 2009 for just £14 [retail price £49] - it integrates into Office and gives superb homework help [Encarta encyclopaedia, Maths equations, languages and English literature]. Well now children that even makes Office 2007 seem desirable. For the rest of though I'd save the pennies and stick with Office 2003 for the time being, assuming you're lucky enough to own it.

I needed Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook for my new laptop, so buying Office Home and Student 2007 + Outlook 2007 made the best financial sense. Home and Student also comes with a programme called OneNote that I really didn't give much thought to, but turns out it is an incredibly useful little programme that I find myself using almost every time I switch my computer on. Gone are my days of using Excel or Word documents to store notes, internet research and online receipts - OneNote does it all, and better too.

Pros (Office Home and Student): you can save to pdf (rather than having to install Adobe or alternate PDF printer), once you get used to it the new menu layouts are actually far more logical, OneNote is an unexpected bonus

Cons (office Home and Student): although the new menu layouts do make more sense you will be cursing out loud for the first month as you make the difficult learning curve from Office 2003, the default document format is not backward compatible - so if you want to share your documents with Office 2003/2000 users you have to remember to save it in a different format

I have to be honest, I would not bother paying to upgrade from Office 2003 - it's just not worth the upgrade price. However, if you are renewing your pc/laptop this is a nice bundle for the home/student user.