Buying MS Office on Ebay

[D4Stone]

I want to buy MS Office 2007 or 2010 Professional and I can find it on Ebay at an average price of $175 US. I am wondering if there is some reason I am not aware of to not buy any of these programs. What do I need to know to make an informed decision?

[Ancient Dragon]

Get OpenOffice -- it is free and compatible with M$ Office.

[happygeek]

Generally speaking, buying on eBay is the same as buying anywhere else if what you are concerned about is getting a genuine product: if the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.

[ksharp25]

Make sure too that would would infact be purchasing physical disc medium to install. Way too many Microsoft products being sold on EBay end up being nothing more than a generic OEM volume license key they send you with a link to Digital River or some other online source to download your product and install. No disk. Problem? Yes. If you ever re-format and re-insall, that "product key" you bought was a once and done deal for installation and is not a true product key that can be used again. Even if you (as I did) burned the downloaded .ISO to a DVD and kept it. I got an exclusive "Student deal" on Windows 7 for $70.00. Thought it was too good to be true, but it worked. Only to find out my legitimately legal student price deal I bought online was a once-and-done product key/download.

Now I did after making a few calls to India and some noise, get them to re-issue me a new Product Key that is full retail key (meaning install as much as I need on upgrades/reformat-reinstalls). But it was a huge hassle. All because of one online deal that was cheap.