You need to purchase either Excel stand-alone or Office. Office is a "suite"
of applications that includes at a minimum Excel, Word, and Outlook. There
are various configurations of Office (Student, Standard, Professional,
Premium, Ultimate etc) that include other applications like PowerPoint,
Access, Groove, and others. The MSRP pricing is such that if you are going
to buy two products as stand-alone versions (e.g., Word and Excel) it is
usually cheaper to buy one of the Office configurations.
The current version of Excel/Office is 2007 or version 12. You may not need
this. On EBay or other sites, you may be able to purchase an earlier version
such as 2000 (version 9), 2002 (aka XP, version 10), or 2003 (version 11).
If you do buy a used copy of Office, which is perfectly legal, make sure you
get all the disks, the documentation, the certificate of authenticity, and
the product key. EBay is rife with illegal copies, bootlegs, and knock-offs
of legitimate copies of Office. Buyer beware. If you are buying used
software, I would suggest version 2003 as the best choice and 2000 as the
bare minimum.
In addition to auction sites, you might want to search for "surplus
software" sites. These are companies that purchase unused copies and
licenses that were originally purchased by large companies. For example,
General Motors might buy 10,000 copies of Office and find they need only
8,000, so 2,000 are sold off to surplus dealers. Again, be sure you are
getting a legitimate and legal copy of Office. These companies, being
established firms, are more likely to provide legitimate software than some
anonymous guy with a CD burner selling disks on EBay.
--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel, 10 Years
Pearson Software Consulting
www.cpearson.com
(email on the web site)
