Microsoft offers students three months free of Office 365

Microsoft is dangling a new offer to get students to try its Office 365 University software.

As of today, students with a qualifying .edu e-mail address can register to receive three months free of Office 365 University and an extra 20GB of space for their SkyDrive online storage. Share the offer on Facebook and you'll get an additional three free months of Office 365.

Geared for college students and teachers, a license for Office 365 University costs $79.99 for four years and is good for up to two PCs or Macs. The educational suite includes the same applications and features found in Office 365 Home Premium, including the 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes worth of Skype calls per month.

Microsoft has also unveiled a couple of promo spots, attempting to show how someone can use Office 365 and SkyDrive together, either individually or with a group.

Microsoft has been touting the subscription-based Office 365 over its desktop counterpart for people who need to run the program on more than one device.

The company initially had restricted Office 2013 to one PC per license with relatively few options to transfer that license to a new PC. In response to user complaints, Microsoft eased those restrictions last week to allow Office 2013 users to transfer their licenses once every 90 days.