Cornell departments will no longer need to purchase Microsoft Office or its upgrades. The university has enrolled in the Microsoft Campus Agreement Program, which will make the software available to all faculty and staff.

The agreement will cover all Cornell-owned work and laboratory machines, as well as home machines used for work purposes. Personal student computers will not be covered.

"Our hope is that providing Microsoft Office for all staff and faculty will reduce license management administration, save users from purchasing individual licenses at high prices from external vendors and aid in software license compliance," said Chuck Jessop, manager of Cornell's Software Licensing Services. Additionally, he said, having more people using the same version will reduce backward compatibility issues, where users of earlier versions of Office applications cannot normally open files created in Office 2007 or later without additional compatibility software.

Microsoft Office includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Entourage and more. Windows users can choose among four suites, some of which also include Access, Publisher and other features. A full list of included software, as well as information about how to download and install Microsoft Office, is available at http://cusoftware.cornell.edu/cusoftware/purchase/msca.cfm.

Unit technical support staff may have plans to schedule and coordinate upgrades, so staff and faculty should check with local support before installing new software.

Cornell Information Technologies Training and Documentation will provide training to help users get to know the different look and feel of the latest versions of Office. For example, there is no longer the traditional menu bar at the top. Instead, a series of tabbed toolbars and large buttons are used to navigate the programs.

To register for a free Office 2007 Getting Started workshop, available now, go to http://www.cornell.veplan.net. Additional free and fee-based workshops will be available after July 1. For questions about training, e-mail workshop-info@cornell.edu. For questions about the terms of the agreement, contact Jessop at cej4@cornell.edu or 255-3016.

Other Microsoft products will still be available to faculty and staff for work purposes at a discounted rate through the Microsoft Select program.