Student? Get 91% Off Microsoft Office Ultimate

[Rob Williams]

http://lifehacker.com/388612/get-91-off-microsoft-office-ultimate

Though there are things I dislike about the latest version of Office, $60 is an absolute steal! You need to be a student though, or at least have access to an .edu account.

 

[Kougar]

*whistles* I gotta say, ya hadn't heard of this one? MS launched it last fall sometime, it was due to end April 31st but MS extended it.

Frontpage got moved into Publisher, and Visio got removed completely and must be bought on its own, not even "Ultimate" offers Visio... and that was a very handy tool for Office 2003. I still feel it is overpriced without Visio, not that happy with the new Frontpage/Publisher combo either.

 

[Rob Williams]

At $60, there is no way it's overpriced. I do agree the lack of Visio makes little sense, especially in an "Ultimate" product, though.

I haven't used Frontpage in a while, but from what I remember, it's the most useless product of the entire Office line-up. It spits out asinine code that follows no web standards. Nothing beats hand coding, but Dreamweaver seems to be the most reliable page builder out there.

 

[Kougar]

Frontpage was extremely easy to use and learn when you had almost no understanding of html. I could make some decent ebay pages pretty quickly, then just paste the raw code in and be done with it. Publisher isn't nearly as easy to use. No way in hell I'm paying $400 for Dreamweaver, although I do hear it suggested quite alot... knowing how "well" Adobe designs their products, I'm sure it's something I can't jump right into and learn as I go as I was able to with Frontpage.

 

[Rob Williams]

For personal sites, Frontpage might be a fine choice, but for something more serious, or in a business environment, it has no place. The problem is that FP, when I last used it, sticks way to close to how the other Office products handle things, when it shouldn't. Frontpage should be like Dreamweaver, as in an application that's built from the ground up to tackle a main task.

I think that statement is proven true simply by the fact that FP is now incorporated into Publisher, and I agree, that's needless. I've tested out Publisher in the past, and gave up fast.

I am not sure if FP is identical to how it used to be, but the prime reason a lot of people dislike it is because of the unbelievable source code it churns out. Even for something simple, the source code would be impossible to follow, making all FP files really only viewable in FP, which is NOT how things should be. An HTML file should be easy for anyone to take and edit, regardless of the editor used.

 

[Kougar]

Well, that is kind of true of any Office product. Pasting things into Word is easy... but pasting things FROM Word is begging for trouble and typially gives extremely messy code. I wouldn't expect anything better for Frontpage, and you are right it makes some messy code. But it was extremely easy to use if you were prolific with Word and yet knew nothing about html, took seconds to make a page together when tidy code didn't matter (Such as ebay).

Things like Photoshop are a royal pain to use. Even if you know Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CS is absurdly different and twice as confusing to use as Elements was on it's worst day.

 

[Rob Williams]

I agree... it's built for the novice and that's where it "excels". I wouldn't mind that so much if it still produced good code though. There's little reason for the code it did produce... just needless. Of course for a small personal site, it doesn't much matter, but Dreamweaver and the like help you develop much more lightweight HTML files, though it's still far from perfect, understandably so.

Photoshop Elements is the same way... it's built for the novice while Photoshop is a pro tool. Photoshop Elements doesn't make the resulting file three times larger in filesize than it needs to be though ;-)