I'm afraid not. Our department has 15 legal vmware licenses, so I'm lucky

No no , I'm not going to give it to you ;-p
You could try wine, it's free, and you can run quite a number of M$-windoze programs with it. There's also a commercial "enhanced" version of wine, called crossover, which can even run the latest M$-office versions and so, and it's much cheaper than vmware (but not free).