If your are a university student Microsoft has two programs that you should know about. The first one, The Ultimate Steal, is on hiatus until August but it will be well worth the wait. By going to
The Ultimate Steal you can join a waiting list to be informed when the program starts again. What it provides is a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition (they are fond of "Ultimate" in this series of program updates), about $680 regualr price, for $59.99.
Ultimate Edition includes Access 2007, Accounting Express 2008, Excel 2007, InfoPath 2007, Groove 2007, OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007 and Word 2007. You must be varified as a student at a post secondary school in order to take advantage of this program, but once you are you will be saving about 90% on the street price of the suite.
I took advantage of the first run of this program and I am glad I did. It would be cool if they offered something similier for the Mac suite, but for us Windows users it is the Ultimate Steal.
For programming and web development students the Dream Spark program
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ is even more exiciting. Microsoft is
giving away almost every development suite they produce for programing and development, including Expression Studio, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. Again, you must go through a verification process in order to download the programs.
Both of these programs are part of Bill Gates' and Microsoft's comitment to education. If you are a student at a US university, you should look into these programs.