Microsoft Office vs Home and Student

Monkey09

Hi,
First off, I just want to say that I'm not too good when it comes to technical issues, so apologies if my question is silly.

Anyway, I've been thinking about buying a netbook and I need it to have the use of Microsoft word. I am currently looking at two second-hand netbooks - One has the regular microsoft office suite and the other has the home and student suite.

My main use for the netbook will be sending my CV to perspective employers so I'm just wonder which would be the best option.

Thanks in advance!

Victor

Yes, it should be suitable.

I'm not sure of the details of the Business version, but I've only once come across software that needed it.

Czarcasm

Monkey09 wrote: »

Hi,
First off, I just want to say that I'm not too good when it comes to technical issues, so apologies if my question is silly.

Anyway, I've been thinking about buying a netbook and I need it to have the use of Microsoft word. I am currently looking at two second-hand netbooks - One has the regular microsoft office suite and the other has the home and student suite.

My main use for the netbook will be sending my CV to prospective employers so I'm just wonder which would be the best option.

Thanks in advance!

It's a good thing you mention OP that you'll only be using the netbook to type up a couple of CV's because honestly, in my opinion at least, netbooks are just nothing short of painful for doing any sort of serious amount of typing or if you're going to be doing a lot of work in Microsoft Word.

With that said, if you're only buying an Office suite to get Word, there are plenty of free alternative office suites out there, and even if you have a hotmail e-mail address, you can type up your CV in Microsoft Word on the web. If you have a gmail e-mail address you could use Google Docs, and there's not much of a learning curve between the two. It'd save you forking out €80 on Home and Student Edition.

My own personal opinion is that if I were you, I wouldn't bother buying a netbook but I'd put that money towards what's called an Ultra Book, just a much more lightweight laptop with a slightly larger screen size than a netbook and the keys are better spaced for typing. Also you'd get the new windows operating system from Microsoft- Windows 8. Technically an ultrabook too would be far superior hardware wise than a netbook, but they start pricey enough at about €600. Thing is though you'd get far more use out of one than a netbook.

Hope this helps.

Overheal

One has the regular microsoft office suite and the other has the home and student suite.

These are incompatible statements. Microsoft Office 2010 comes in 5 versions (for PC): Home and Student, Home and Business, and Professional. The 2 other versions are Professional Academic and University. They vary in what pieces of software they include: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Lync, Sharepoint, Infopath, etc. and on how many installations you can have running at the same time.

Using alternative suites like OpenOffice, it should be noted, might not carry over to the same format as Word, which is what pretty much all employers are going to have. So if you do a CV in OpenOffice and pretty it up, it may not look the same when someone opens it in Word, or worse if you attach a document with the wrong file extension from the openoffice program, that Word can't read, that could be bad.

Czarcasm

Overheal wrote: »

Using alternative suites like OpenOffice, it should be noted, might not carry over to the same format as Word, which is what pretty much all employers are going to have. So if you do a CV in OpenOffice and pretty it up, it may not look the same when someone opens it in Word, or worse if you attach a document with the wrong file extension from the openoffice program, that Word can't read, that could be bad.

Excellent point Overheal, and having read over the OP there again I see that both netbooks are being offered with some version of office on them. Home and Student would be fine for what the OP wants to do, as far as I can remember, the professional edition comes with outlook and a few other bits that's only be useful really in a business environment.

So true though about formatting differences and open source software but I had presumed the OP would just be printing out their CV's as opposed to the way I got caught when I did up a presentation in OpenOffice and then opened it in PowerPoint to test how it looked... It was some bloody nightmare trying to fix it up!

Overheal

Czarcasm wrote: »

Excellent point Overheal, and having read over the OP there again I see that both netbooks are being offered with some version of office on them. Home and Student would be fine for what the OP wants to do, as far as I can remember, the professional edition comes with outlook and a few other bits that's only be useful really in a business environment.

So true though about formatting differences and open source software but I had presumed the OP would just be printing out their CV's as opposed to the way I got caught when I did up a presentation in OpenOffice and then opened it in PowerPoint to test how it looked... It was some bloody nightmare trying to fix it up!

Yup. Haven't had personal experience but I know better. It's even bad enough with some minor backwards compatibility issues with new versions and old versions of Office. The community college near hear does a Comp 101 class where the only way to get an A is to submit all work using Word 2007: if you create the file in Word 2010 (even if you save it to the Word 2007 format) it won't carry every little odd nitpicky thing the teachers are looking for and the highest grade you can get is an 85. The baffling part is not that they have such a grading requirement, or even that 2010 to 2007 is a little borked, but that the school would keep using the now-unobtainable 2007 version.

But yeah, Home and student will have what most people need. I have my hands on Professional Academic and Professional through Work and I can tell you exactly how useful I have found the high-end stuff to be. At most, I could probably find a use for Outlook but I just haven't been bothered to set it up correctly, it only makes sense to me if you really need to manage volumes of contacts and mailing lists and such (Business usage); for a regular Joe the outlook client is overkill versus what your smartphone has already integrated.

Duggy747

Home & Student is Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Onenote. If it's just standard word processing like documents and CVs then that's all you need. The other versions of Office are more so for business environments that need the likes of Outlook and Access.

You could use OpenOffice which saves in the 2003 .doc format but you can easily run into format issues with the person on the other end looking at garbage.

PrzemoF

OP, invest in the hardware, download LibreOffice and send your CVs as PDF, unless directly asked for .doc format.

Czarcasm

PrzemoF wrote: »

OP, invest in the hardware, download LibreOffice and send your CVs as PDF, unless directly asked for .doc format.

The only problem with that is while most technical people prefer to use PDF, from talking to people in HR, they have software that can "read and weed" CV's in *.doc format only. Might be no harm though for the OP to upload their CV to a couple of job sites like monster.ie, etc. I know some people too that have their CV uploaded to their LinkedIn profile- a great resource for making first contact with the right people in the types of industry you might be applying for.

Victor

Czarcasm wrote: »

It's a good thing you mention OP that you'll only be using the netbook to type up a couple of CV's because honestly, in my opinion at least, netbooks are just nothing short of painful for doing any sort of serious amount of typing or if you're going to be doing a lot of work in Microsoft Word.

You can easily get a full-size, external keyboard for use at home / in the office and use the small keyboard when on the move. Keyboard might cost €10-15. External mouse might be useful also.

Czarcasm

Victor wrote: »

You can easily get a full-size, external keyboard for use at home / in the office and use the small keyboard when on the move. Keyboard might cost €10-15. External mouse might be useful also.

Ah I know Victor, I just gave up on the novelty of the damn thing and gave it to my eight year old instead of buying him one of those v-tech toy laptop efforts for nearly the same price! He has it hooked up to his tv in his bedroom with a wireless mouse and keyboard dual booting windows 7 and linux mint!