Is there anywhere that we as students can purchase Microsoft Office products at a discount due to them being used for educational purposes?  I tried to download the trial period of Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student, but it takes over 3 hours to load, and part way through, it shut down.  I need Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to complete an assignment.  It would be great if Penn Foster were to add the Microsoft Products to there bookstore for purchase at a discount.

Newegg would be my choice.  I did a quick search there, and you can check the results here.

Unless you specifically need Microsoft Office, I would save those hundreds of dollars and give OpenOffice a try.  It's a free, open source alternative that's sponsored by Sun Microsystems.  It can do everything that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can do.

http://openoffice.org

-=Steve=- 

I totally understand where Steve is coming from on this however MS Office use does 2 things.

 

1.) You have to learn how to use MS Office, in my case even some of the advanced features which helps me in the workplace believe it or not.

2.) MS Office is pretty much universal in business use, so there is a ton of support out there for it.

 

However Steve is right in that it is very expensive for what it is.  I recommend you either purchase the software through your school, as I did, and take advantage of the discount there or go to Amazon.com or something and purchase Microsoft Office "Student/Teacher Edition" which is the basic package minus Access and a couple of programming features for databasing.  I use the Student/Teacher Edition and have not been limited in any way whatsoever.  Personally I tried Open Office and found following directions using MS Office easier.