Microsoft has announced that students around the world can access Office 365 free-of-charge through their school. The news is an exciting development that will open up the online version of Office as well as an installed version of Office to students globally. Until today this was only available to students and educators in the United States.
To find out if you are eligible, you need a valid school address and have access to that email to get the verification information. For students, go to this link to see if you qualify. For Teachers, you go to this link. Once you have been verified, you can get the latest version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access and Publisher and can install it on up to five PCs or Macs and up to 5 mobile devices. In addition, you get 1TB of OneDrive storage so you can share all your files across your devices and of course access to the online versions of Office.
It is an amazing deal and great to see how Microsoft is supporting educators and students by providing this powerful suite of applications free. It also should squelch some undertones in the market that Microsoft is not really interested in the Education market, having all-but given up on it thanks to the heavy push from Apple. Clearly that is not the case. By giving educators and students access to a full Office 365 account should remove any doubt.
For more information on this program, check out the Office Blogs.
