I've moaned a few times in the past about the high expense of upgrading to the versions of MS Office that would work for me, mainly due to my need for Access alongside the other more popular bits. I strongly suspect it is due to the relatively imminent introduction of Office 2010, but I finally found a deal I could live with. Amazon currently has a MS Office 2007 Ultimate upgrade (and I've got Outlook 2007, so the upgrade works for me despite my much older other Office products) for just under $250. Not only does that include the Access I need, but also the OneNote that I've been very interested in having for some time now, which is not in the Professional version I'd have been likely to get previously due to the upwards of $500 price of the Ultimate upgrade in the past (and still at a number of on-line stores I checked). Interestingly, the Professional version at Amazon is currently going for more than the Ultimate version for the upgrade package. Very strange. Best Buy had an even lower price on the Ultimate upgrade, but it was showing it as currently unavailable. The additional cool thing about this is that they've already started the promotion to get and activate Office 2007 now and get a free update to Office 2010 when it is available (or the possibility of paying some nominal rate to get the DVD version). The Ultimate will actually upgrade to Professional in the 2010 strain, but the basic applications will be the same, with the few things that aren't included in the 2010 version, where there is no Ultimate package, being stuff I believe is aimed at corporate environments and multi-user data sychronization. Since I'm currently on Office 97 for all but Outlook, the ultimate update to the 2010 version will be a 13 year shift forward. Back to the future? ;-) Rick -- ======================================= Rick Paul Closet Cowboy Music (ASCAP) Web: www.RickPaul.info MySpace: www.myspace.com/rickpaulmusic =======================================
