Difference Between MS Office Student and Professional

MS Office Student vs Professional

Microsoft’s Office suite of productivity applications comes in a variety of packages or suites. One of the suites is meant for students. The main difference between the Student suite and the Professional suite is the applications that they come with. Both have the basic applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. But Student doesn’t have the Outlook, Access, and Publisher applications that you would otherwise find in the Professional.

Outlook is an application that handles your email and schedules so that you are always informed on what’s happening and plan your activities accordingly. This is appropriate for working peole with busy schedules who regularly connect to Outlook servers for their mails and not students.

Access is a database management tool that lets you create, modify, or just look-up databases. These are often used to keep track of inventories, subscribers, and the like in businesses. Quite naturally, Access is very useful to people who are working in companies that use databases to keep track of all their data.

Publisher is pretty similar to Word but it gives prime focus on how you layout the elements like text and pictures on a page. This is very useful in creating publications, whether it just for your office or for the general public.

The three applications mentioned above are the only things that you do not get with Student. They are not really very essential and majority of students have no need for any of these applications. With the general applications like Word, you get all the functionalities and there are no restricted or missing features.

If you have no need for the three applications mentioned above, you can slash a huger amount from the purchase price of MS Office. The Student suite only retails for about $149 while the Professional suite adds $350 for a whopping $499 retail price; more than three times the price.

The last difference between the two comes in the form of technical support from Microsoft. The Professional suite comes with a free one year technical support so you can just call Microsoft’s techs whenever you have a problem with MS Office. The Student suite also comes with technical support, but only for 90 days.

Summary:

Student doesn’t have Outlook, Access, and Publisher while Professional does
Student is a lot cheaper than Professional
Professional includes one year of technical support while Student only has 90 days

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