Microsoft Office is, without a doubt, the most famous office suite in the world. Not even the appearance of free-to-use alternatives such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice have managed to dethrone Microsoft’s set of programs in terms of popularity. If you are part of the educational sector as a student or university, —and even a teacher— you may not yet know that you can access tools such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel and many more for free and completely legally.
If you’re a student, teacher, or college faculty member with an active school email address, chances are you’re already on Microsoft’s registry to provide its free tools, the Microsoft Office 365 Education program, and you can get Office for free.
How to access the free version for students
The first thing we must do to find out if our educational center is already registered in Microsoft Office 365 Education is to access the main web page of the service . In the text box we can enter the school email address to verify if said institution appears in the system. Otherwise, if you attend an institution that needs to be verified, it could take up to a month to confirm that you can participate in this plan.
Example of educational Office 365 at the UNED
Once we have the system OK, the next step is to choose the type of account that we are going to use, choosing between students and teachers. Once you have chosen the option that corresponds to you, you can register in Office 365 Education and access the main page of the service.
This page will give us a summary of the applications assigned to our account. In addition to being able to access the service online, we can also download a package with the Office applications by clicking on an “Install Office” button in the upper right and later on the “Office 365 Applications” option. For this, an A3 or A5 plan will be necessary, which we will talk about below.
Within the details of your account you will be able to know your unique user identifier, as well as the status and type of license assigned to your school email account.
What tools does the free version offer?
By default, the free Office 365 Education subscription is named A1 . It includes Office 365 for the web free with popular apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. In addition, it includes up to 50 Gb of storage in OneDrive, access to Teams and SharePoint.
Office 365 Education account types
Other alternatives for which the educational center in question (or yourself) would have to assume an extra cost are the A3 and A5 payment plans . The A3 plan, priced at €2.45 per user per month, includes all the benefits of the A1, plus the option to install the Office desktop apps on up to five PCs or Macs per user, as well as up to five tablets and five phones per user.
The A5 plan, priced at 5.90 euros per user per month, is basically the A3 along with Microsoft management of intelligent security, advanced compliance and analytics systems. To find out all the differences in services, you can consult an official Microsoft PDF document with all the comparative tables of plans .
These licenses generally have an annual periodicity, but they can even remain valid for a time after you have finished your studies at the educational center in question, so you may be able to enjoy the advantages for a long time after finishing your studies.