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Free - Office 365 for Students and Educators @ Microsoft

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I received this deal via an email from the little bot's school.

I generally don't like to post these OzReminders or repeat deals but this is an exception as it may be helpful to those with kids going back to school next week.

Students and educators at eligible institutions can sign up for Office 365 Education for free, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams, plus additional classroom tools. Use your valid school email address to get started today.


Credit to those that have posted this in the past.

Previous long expiry post

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closed Comments

    • +4

      Anything wrong with that?

    • -1

      I upvoted your comment

      • Awesome… Paypal deposit has been sent…

    • +7

      (profanity) me you're a serial pest

    • +1

      Always has been.

    • Correct. It's always been free for the kiddos.

  • Do they get any cloud storage with it?

    • -3

      Unlimited afaik

    • +3

      I believe its 1TB for OneDrive storage and 50GB Mailbox on the A1 student license.

      • +1

        Can confirm it's 1TB for OneDrive

    • Thank you! I just got one drive family subscription, that comes with 1TB for each family member. My son can use that for personal/phone storage and student account for school work.

  • +5

    I can't figure out why so many schools are using google apps which have less features than 365.

    • -2

      Many primary school kids don't get .edu email addresses…

      • +2

        in nsw, they get @education.nsw.gov.au

        • even in primary school?

      • +1

        Mr JV you say many things that get you downvoted but in my opinion this one on this occasion is not fair.
        You are correct in that "many" primary school children are not offered .edu email addresses because in particular the younger ones shouldn't be given access to communicating with other people without parents knowledge. How do I know this? The staff at my sons primary school told me this when I asked for an .edu email address so I (yes I) could buy some stuff from the Samsung Education Store. It makes sense that the parents need to request the email address, particularly for kids in Prep & grade 1, so the parents can setup the email for their children. Then the parents are aware of the potential risks for their kids to be able to be contacted through email by unknown people.

        • -3

          my opinion this one on this occasion is not fair.

          There are lots of people here on OzBargain that cannot face the truth and just downvote.
          Hopefully, now that Trump is no longer president, they will all go back into their holes…

          Thank you for your kind words of support…

          • +2

            @jv: Blaming Trump lmao

            • -1

              @Narvey Horman:

              Blaming Trump lmao

              No, just his supporters…

              • +1

                @jv: So people who downvote you are all Trump supporters? Proof?

                • -2

                  @Narvey Horman:

                  So people who downvote you are all Trump supporters?

                  Where did I say 'all' ???

                  Stop making stuff up…

                  • +1

                    @jv: "Hopefully, now that Trump is no longer president, they will all go back into their holes"

                    Stop passing the buck.

                    • +3

                      @Narvey Horman:

                      Stop passing the buck.

                      That's an Americanism…

                      • @jv: "That's an Americanism…" So does that make me a "Trump supporter"? lmao. It's a widely used expression used in the English speaking world and is irrelevant to you claiming Trump is responsible for you being downvoted.
                        Blaming American politics for being downvoted on an Australian discount site is stupidity.

                        • +2

                          @Narvey Horman:

                          "That's an Americanism…" So does that make me a "Trump supporter"?

                          It's possible, but only you can answer that…

                          Whether or not we believe you though is another thing.

                          • -4

                            @jv: You made the assertion so you have to answer it Einstein. Look at your comment history. You live on this site. You need to worry less about people downvoting your lame little comments and worry more about wtf you're doing with your life.

                            • @Narvey Horman:

                              so you have to answer it Einstein.

                              Einstein died a long time ago.

                              I doubt he would have been a Trump fan anyway…

                              • @jv: Yet again you avoid the main point and try to argue semantics… poorly btw.

                            • +1

                              @Narvey Horman:

                              You need to worry less about people downvoting your lame little comments

                              LOL… as if i care about the votes. Seems like you do though.

                              • -1

                                @jv: LOL
                                Blaming others for your own mistakes. You're the only Trump supporter here.

                                • +1

                                  @Narvey Horman:

                                  You're the only Trump supporter here.

                                  LOL… That's exactly what Trump would say.

                                  • -1

                                    @jv: Blaming others for their own stupidity is exactly what Trump would do. Thanks for finally admitting you're an idiot. Wasn't that hard now was it?

                                    • @Narvey Horman:

                                      Blaming others for their own stupidity

                                      Just blame yourself then…

                                      • @jv: When you can do that then your "theory" that Trump is to blame for all your downvotes collapses. Beginning to make sense now genius?

                                        • @Narvey Horman: It's not my theory.

                                          • -1

                                            @jv: Yes it is. But you can't prove it so you try to argue semantics and use juvenile ad hominem attacks instead.

                                            • @Narvey Horman:

                                              Yes it is.

                                              Nope.

                                              • -1

                                                @jv: Look how lightening fast this closet Trump supporter replies lmao. Get outside genius and get some sunshine. You need it.

                                                • @Narvey Horman:

                                                  Trump supporter replies

                                                  Are you on your way to Florida?

                                                  • @jv: Another lame attempt at arguing semantics.

                                                    • @Narvey Horman: That's what I expected you to say… Very predictable like all the other Trump supporters.

                                                      • @jv: You expected me to respond using logic? Thanks for the compliment. Time to put your MAGA hat back in your closet. Your revolution is over.

                                                        • @Narvey Horman:

                                                          You expected me to respond using logic?

                                                          Of course not

                                                          Why start using logic now, after the election is lost…

                                                          • @jv: I would never vote for someone like Trump you moron. You have to tell yourself that because you can't admit no one likes you on this site. "Only 'Trump supporters' could possibly hate me" lmao. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact you literally sit there all day/night spamming this site with cynical posts could it?

                                                            • -1

                                                              @Narvey Horman:

                                                              I would never vote for someone like Trump you mormon.

                                                              You're only saying that because you are not a US citizen and aren't allowed to vote.

                                                              Also, please live religion out of this…

                                                              • @jv: Yet another "attempt" at semantics (you might want to look up the meaning of the term). What's that, like your 8th try? Keep trying, maybe one day you'll actually say something clever.

                                                              • @jv:

                                                                Also, please live religion out of this

                                                                That sentence makes no sense. Even more so than your others. Try again.

    • +4

      Per user/licence I am led to believe the cost difference is pretty large, especially when you take faculty into account on top of students.

      • +2

        Office 365 A3 license is $3.60/user/month (Provides access to the Office desktop apps, or A1 is free but online only) vs G Suite free or $4/month IIRC

        • +2

          Not sure if this is legacy on our platform, but we utilise an A1 Plus license that is still free and gives access to all Office desktop apps.

          • @DialIN: Pretty sure we do too.

        • +3

          And to further this, just checked our account, and we get 500,000 free Office 365 A1 for faculty and 1,000,000 free Office 365 A1 for students.

          I do generally prefer Google, but that's primary because I was in that ecosystem for so long (and personally have one of the legacy free Google Apps for Business accounts for 10 users), but am growing more fond of Office 365.

          • +1

            @tomsco: Google Apps for Business (G Suite/Google Workspace/Whatever it is now) sucks and I'd happily move to O365 if I could split my Google account into a personal account and keep all my Play Store purchases, YouTube data, etc.
            Not to mention how crippled Workspace accounts are (eg, with Google Assistant and Google Home stuff)

            As it stands, if I leave Workspace, I lose all of that data because I was dumb enough to use the free Google Apps for Business tier to host my personal domain and use it for everything :(

            • @b3au: Google Takeout should work for most user data, but I can't think of any solution to move digital purchases unfortunately :(

              Maybe use the contact phone in GSuite admin and talk to a rep about your options directly? State it a as a query 'one of my users has been purchasing on the Play Store with their work account instead of their personal account. What options do they have to move these purchases?'

              • @Switchblade88: Unfortunately there is no option - it's gone - all the Play Store purchases and subscriptions, Google Voice numbers, discounted subscriptions via Google Pay, YouTube uploads, play counts and whatnot, etc.

                Takeout will get most of it 'out' but obviously things like YouTube links no longer work.

                It just 'sucks' - Ideally there should be a way to 'migrate' a Workspace account to a private account (so basically pick a new @gmail.com address instead of [email protected]) while keeping all of the data (or at least. the admin could opt to pick what not to include when that account is migrated out…..)

    • +4

      gapps offered free education license many years before o365 introduced.

      so it's typical vendor lock-in effect.

      • +1

        A lot of the schools also provide netbooks to students as they're lower costs. (ie, Chromium instead of Windows)
        The MS Office web apps are getting better but they're not as polished as the Gsuite apps.

        • +3

          Depends what you’re using. Sheets is atrocious, especially considering the automation stuff Microsoft built into the online version of Excel.

          On the other hand, Google wins documents. Which I guess matters more for students.

          • @freefall101: Wow I prefer Google Sheets but Microsoft Word. Sheets has functions which save me time as I don't need to write a macro to do things.

            • +1

              @Hintswen: I had to write a function manipulating 5000 lines of data and it simply fell over. That and slicers are terrible (also graphs built off pivots)

              Don’t use macros, use get and transform or the online automation. It’ll change your life.

              • @freefall101: You might want to check this blog
                This particular post detailed how he does 1.5 Billion rows in google sheet.

                I see more and more data scientists use google sheet simply because they can write python in it. They said the automation on MS is good if you do simple basic stuff but quite limited if you need to do custom stuff.

                • @Indomietable: Ah, I think that's the problem, I wasn't using the enterprise version when I created something. I wrote a query to unpivot some data (which involved creating an array via a query with about 150,000 cells) and it fell over with an error, "result too big".

                  I use python with Excel all the time, but Get and Transform creates a JET database on the backend, same as Power BI (and similar to Google's BigQuery). 1.5B row count is nothing in any of those platforms, but transformations in Get and Transform are basically miracles, no code ways to handle a lot of data.

                  Power Query is much more friendly than BigQuery as well by the looks of it. But then maybe it's just because I'm used to the Microsoft environment. But if you want to do custom stuff, the sky is the limit.

                  • @freefall101: Wait - how do you use python in excel? Here am I still using VBA and powerquery like a loser.

                    EDIT: Oh I see.. not native just 3rd party stuff. openpyxl, xlwings etc

                    • @lunchbox99: Yeah, xlwings, I should have clarified.

                      I don't use it much anymore because I'm usually a contractor onsite with zero options on software. 90% of clients use Office 365 and I can quickly knock something out through power automate/office scripts/power query/whatever. Just had one that uses Google stuff the other day and it's a bloody nightmare, but only because no one gave me an enterprise account apparently.

                      It's also much easier to train the staff how to maintain Microsoft's low-code stuff than explain how SQL works. So I am very biased on the matter.

          • @freefall101: Uh no, Sheets is much better. You cant even add a simple checkbox in excel without jumping through hoops. Cant do something like B2:B. Have to write visual basic for advanced use cases compared to javascript.

            At least for my use cases i strongly prefer sheets.

    • I actually prefer GSuite over Office for what I use.

      • +1

        A few teachers in one school I have spoken to have complained of the loss of various features in docs and sheets compared to 365 word and excel. I can't remember what they said they couldn't do in gapps. But the school had moved from 365 to google. The chrome books provided at my daughter's school are so slow that the kids hate them and most parents have bought their kids a faster windows laptop or macbook.

        • I can't think of any Excel features I'm missing but I do prefer Word over Docs (Mainly because the few times I need to send a document to someone they have Word and things look a little different in word, I never send Google Sheets to anyone other than providing them access to view/edit it online so if there are any differences between how a file looks in Sheets vs Excel I've never run into the issue).

    • Private schools don't get .edu emails and also the collaboration aspect of google apps + integration with google classroom seems to be the reason schools prefer them over 365.

  • Can someone explain how the OneDrive storage works in this scenario? Since Office 365 access is via our school/uni email, so actual administrators are school/uni staff. Do they have the access to all our files and what happens when we leave the school/uni?

    • +4

      Do they have the access to all our files

      As administrators yes

      What happens when we leave the school/uni?

      Depends on policy but they can delete them

    • +2

      IIRC admin can't pick your account without changing password. (Which you'll notice about it)
      but yeah, they have right to terminate your email/account/files stored for sure. so perhaps don't put anything serious in there?

      • +7

        O365 admins can 100% access your files and emails without changing your password.

      • +3

        Administrators can access OneDrive, Email etc on your O365 tenant without changing a user's password or them even knowing.

    • I was able to use Office for about 8 years after finishing uni. Eventually I received an email stating that access would be removed within a month and to save everything on my online storage for that login. Now when I login and see what office app I have access to, I get the following:

      You currently have not been assigned an Office license that includes the Office desktop apps. Contact your admin for more information about how to get Office for your organization.

      Still have use of my uni email account though.

      • Gees at least they told you. Mine just cut off my access one day.

        • That happened to me twice, but I was able to use the MS Education link to renew the licence, and everything was still there. I assumed the same would happen after they emailed me, but unfortunately not, can't get around it this time.

    • +1

      Out of interest has anyone been successful in using rclone or similar to encrypt their uploads to edu onedrive? I've tried before but admin policies prevented it. But that would be a nice way to get several TB of free cloud storage.

  • -6

    There's open source offline options like LibreOffice. It used to be great to have MS Office as student but now you get spied on by School and MS and probably USA government too.

    • +1

      I've tried both LibreOffice and OpenOffice and neither are even close to Microsoft Office/GSuite.

    • +3

      Can't believe you got only negs.

      My kids have MS on their laptops but I also installed libre. I teach them to use libre for any of their own stuff and MS only for final things to hand into school. I've told them if they think MS offers them something more to use it - I'm fine with them using it if it has benefits. They don't / haven't. Happy to be showing them there are alternatives, especially open source.

    • -1

      Do you really think school IT staff have the time to ‘spy’ on you??

  • +1

    Always has been

  • How many devices can we activate the office with the student email account?

    • 5 installs/acitvations/devices

  • Just a heads up there may be some cloud limitations with this. For example, when I had the TAFE office 365, files with onedrive could only be shared within TAFE, and I could only join not initiate teams meetings.
    Also onedrive space was limited to 50GB.

  • Does anyone know what happens to the license when your pass out off and no longer have the valid student email?
    —Does the license runs after that or only till you are a student?

    • I got the answer on Microsoft website:

      "You can use the plan as long as you are working at a qualified school. Your eligibility may be re-verified at any time. When your Office 365 Education plan expires:

      The Office applications enter a reduced-functionality mode, which means that you can view documents, but you cannot edit or create new documents.
      Online services associated with the school email address—for example, Office Online and OneDrive—will no longer work.
      If your plan expires, you can extend your plan by re-verifying your status as an educator, or by moving to an Office 365 personal plan."

  • I have an existing Onedrive account that is almost full of storage. I also have a valid uni email address to access office 365 as per this deal. Anyone know if it's possible to link these accounts at all?

    • No. They are separate products - you'd have 'OneDrive' on a personal Microsoft account, and then there's 'OneDrive for Business' which is just a fancy name and frontend for SharePoint.

      You can have multiple accounts in Office 365 apps or the OneDrive desktop app, but you can't otherwise 'link' or easily migrate data without copy & paste or drag and drop.

  • +2

    its Microsoft's propaganda to make students to start using Office 365, get into the ecosystem them paying them back in later lives

    • -2

      Careful, there are paid MS shills that need to prove their loyalty to MS. Try suggesting other free options and get downvoted quickly.

      • +1

        Simple fact is - almost any job is going to land you on a computer w/ Office installed, and you'll be expected to know how to use it.

      • +1

        I don't think you got negged for suggesting alternative free options.

    • +4

      Haha I had to laugh at this. You mean, compared to Apple that offered heavily discounted incentive programs to universities for years to get students at university level (particularly in design fields) used to working with Macs, who would then not only continue to work with Macs throughout their career, they'd end up becoming obnoxious evangelists of massively overpriced, underperforming $#!&boxes that could only compete due to the skill of the marketing team's International Brainwashing Programme. iSheeple.

      Look, Apple does this, Microsoft do this, Adobe does this - most tech businesses with half a brain have 'student discounts', because it's smart for your brand - get those who are learning using your platform cheaply or freely, so they will continue to use what they know and are comfortable with throughout their career, becoming loyal paying customers once they can afford it. I can't believe I'm actually bothering to explain this to someone… Oh right, you're trolling. Well done troll {golf claps}

  • +10

    Pro life hack - I finished UNI years ago so I enrol in randoms subjects to maintain full-time student status to get student discounts and free office 365.
    The only downside is I owe the government 3.4 million in hecs-help debt.

    • +1

      To put it simply its not worth it for so called pro life hack

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