Paying for Microsoft Office Now a Thing of the Past

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Published on October 29, 2016

Far too many students are wasting their money.

Students who invest their hard-earned money on Microsoft Office are essentially just throwing it away. Photo by Purple Slog.

Students who invest their hard-earned money on Microsoft Office are essentially just throwing it away. Photo by Purple Slog.

Many HCC students have innocently purchased a new version of Microsoft Office completely unaware of their free access to Office 365. The question then becomes, how could they have missed this? More importantly, how do they access it?

Office 365 is a service provided to all students through myCommNet. The application can be downloaded by any student on up to five devices, and is loaded with tons of useful features for anyone.

Downloading Office 365 is simple. Through the student email page, there is a button at the top left corner of the screen that says “Office 365.” After clicking on this you will be redirected to a new page that gives you the option to download Office 2016 for free! Features included in Office 365 include Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and many others. Other features provided by Office 365 are an email account with 25 GB of storage, Skype for business, and OneDrive for business, which provides 1TB of online storage.

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are particularly popular among students, providing a way of completing essays and presentations for class assignments.  Outlook along with a provided email address from HCC and Skype for business allow students a safe and easy way to stay in touch with professors. Additionally, OneDrive is a cloud storage program which allows students to save their work where it can be accessed from any computer with OneDrive.

HCC student Chris Kay has found a lot of success using Office 365 to complete his assignments.

“I’m able to do all my presentations on PowerPoint AND I use Microsoft Word basically every night for my homework.” Kay said.

He has many financial responsibilities at HCC between classes and books; not having to worry about a means of completing his homework is certainly a comforting feeling for him.

Many students, on the other hand, have no idea what they are missing out on, such as HCC student Nick Falbo.

“Nobody told me that we could get Office for free,” Falbo said. “I have been unable to do any homework on my laptop; I have no choice but to bring a flash drive around with me. It has been a huge inconvenience to me, and I’m going to download 365 as soon as I get home.”

Like Falbo, so many other students do not know how they were supposed to know about this opportunity. Academically, this service can be a life-saver to a majority of students and there is no reason for anyone at HCC to have to spend any money to access it.

Office 365 is the free solution to many of your problems. From completing homework to communicating with instructors, Office 365 provides all the tools students need to get that 4.0 GPA.