Microsoft offers students at eligible educational institutions access to full Office productivity suite for no additional cost

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As part of our ongoing commitment to education, we are thrilled to announce Student Advantage, a new benefit to qualifying institutions which will make it easy for students to use the latest and best version of full Office at their education institution and at home. 

Student Advantage - Office 365 ProPlus

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So what does this mean? From 1st December, 2013, any institutions worldwide that licenses Office for staff and faculty can provide access to Office 365 ProPlus for students at no additional cost. As a result, more than 35,000 institutions worldwide are automatically eligible to deliver the Student Advantage benefit to their students. 

Office 365 ProPlus includes all the familiar and full Office applications, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and offers the ability for these to be locally installed on up to five devices and available offline.

Furthermore, when a school combines Student Advantage with our other cloud services - Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online - of which all are available free through Office 365 Education, students have access to the same set of productivity tools and services used by Fortune 500 companies all over the world.

“Students use Office every day for school work and activities that are most important to them. Office not only helps students stay organised and get their work done today, but at the same time develops skills that will be required when they enter the workforce,”  said Antony Salcito, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector Education at Microsoft. “We are thrilled to offer Student Advantage to schools across the globe so students have access to the latest, most up-to-date version of the world’s leading set of productivity tools in order to give them a competitive advantage when entering the workforce.”

To help you learn more about this benefit to your students, we are going to be running a number of Q&A sessions via Yammer and Twitter over the next week. More details to follow via the blog and our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In the meantime, if you have any immediate questions or queries, drop us a note in the comments below.

1 Windows PC client programs and/or features only. Cannot be used across devices.