Office v.X Test Drive available or get rebate with Mac purchase

Apple and Microsoft, at MacWorld SanFrancisco today, released information with a view to getting more Apple users to try Microsoft's Office v.X for free or to entice possible new apple purchasers to buy Office v.X with a rebate program.

The Office v.X Test Drive lets you experience the beauty, power, and stability of all four Office v.X programs: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage — the e-mail application and personal information manager. Inside the Office v.X Test Drive you'll see how Office v.X combines several new and improved features with core Mac OS X technologies.

There are however, a few limitations to this test drive version of Office v.X, no programmability support, no Toolbar customizations and customized keyboard commands, Printing is not allowed, In Excel, the Conditional Sum Wizard add-in has been removed, Word will open documents in Word 97 - X format and AppleWorks 5 and 6 format only, Excel and Word documents display an Office v.X Test Drive logo in the background and a host of ther changes...

You can either order the test drive on CD, or download it, at a whopping 122mb, as Microsoft "recommend" that "only broadband users obtain it via this distribution method".

Microsoft also launched a "Suite Deal". Buy any Mac and Microsoft Office v.X and save up to $150

Between January 7 and March 31, 2002 :-

Buy any Mac and the full version of Microsoft Office v.X to receive a $150 mail-in rebate
Buy any Mac and the Microsoft Office v.X upgrade to receive a $75 upgrade mail-in rebate.
Buy Mac OS X and Microsoft Office v.X (full version or upgrade) to receive a $50 upgrade mail-in rebate.