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Dubbed "The Ultimate Steal" the offer gives students access to the full range of Office applications, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Access and OneNote. The offer represents an enormous discount on the full boxed version of Office Ultimate edition, which costs £492.

To be considered eligible for the offer a student must be actively enrolled in university and hold a valid e-mail address at that institution.

Microsoft says that if a student's e-mail address

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can't be verified, additional information will be taken instead, although at the time of publication it had no further details on how this would work.

For those unable to afford the £39 for the perpetual license, a one-year subscription will also be offered for £12.95.

"Students have been telling us for some time that they want more flexible ways to acquire Microsoft Office at student pricing levels," says Alan Yates, general manager of worldwide education at Microsoft. "In terms of the timing, I think what really kicked it off was the proliferation of buying behavior on the web of large file size assets such as movies, large music files, and other software tools that require a significant download.

"Generally speaking, good broadband coverage exists in the countries that we're launching the promotion in so we think it makes a huge amount of sense for us to offer Office via download as well for students."

The offer is being rolled out initially in the US, Canada and the UK, followed on September 20 by Spain, Italy and France.