[nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress

[Elizabeth Campbell]

Hello Curtis,

I am using Office 13 at home on my laptop running Windows 8. I must confess
that I did not have  the installation headaches as I purchased my system and
software from Bestbuy. The store in my area has a very helpful geek squad,
and I explained that I wanted to put the computer through its paces using
JAWS and so forth before I purchased it.
The Best Buy folks took care of all of the installations for me as I
purchased a year of tech support for my devices.
I primarily use office 13 for Outlook and Word. I am a fan of outlook, so I
was very disappointed to see that it often crashes, sometimes while I'm
reading or writing a message then mysteriously restarts. IN Word, I haven't
used the return address features since I'm creating documents for use at
home or at work, and I send 99 percent of my correspondences via email.
However, I've had a lot of frustration accessing documents that are
protected.
JAWS will start reading the file and then stop. I believe what happens is
that Word shuts down and then restarts because I get a prompt about
recovering files which I can never find.
Interestingly enough, I ran in to this problem last week when accessing some
documents for a Newsline seminar.
I believe there is a way to unprotect files, but I haven't found it yet.
Curtis, I agree that Office 13 is very much a work in progress, and I hope
Microsoft does come out with a service pack that will repair these bugs
which make it almost impossible to use Office reliably.
At work, I an using Windows 7 and Office 2007,and I haven't had the same
frustrations.

Best regards.

Liz Campbell

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Curtis Chong
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 11:06 AM
To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nfbcs] Office 2013: Very Much A Work In Progress

Greetings and felicitations:

Early this month, I took the rather bold step of upgrading from Microsoft
Office 2010 to Microsoft Office 2013. I am running the 64-bit version of
Windows 7 Professional.

I am interested in hearing from anyone out there who has taken a similar
journey. Permit me to provide a brief summary of my experiences so far.

To begin with, the upgrade was not at all a trouble-free experience. The
first thing that Office 2013 wanted me to do was to link to either an
existing or new Microsoft account. There appears no way to avoid this step.
Since I had a Microsoft account (which I had never used for years and years)
I had to spend considerable time trying to get my password back. This was
only the first problem.

Then, Office wanted to set up Sky Drive on my computer, which I allowed at
first and have since removed.

After the install was finished (hours of work), I tried starting Word. Right
away, I received a message (which was not spoken by JAWS for Windows)
indicating that the program had stopped working. There seemed to be no way
around this problem. In the end, I had to contact Microsoft Support over the
telephone so that someone could remote into my computer and run some kind of
a repair.

While I am now using Microsoft Office 2013 to do real work, I must point out
that using this software is not without its problems. For one thing, there
are many situations during which JAWS goes silent and during which one
simply has to wait for something to happen. For another, there are frequent
instances when either Word or Outlook will crash and then recover--all in
complete silence (from a nonvisual access standpoint).

I don't know about the rest of you, but one strategy which I often use is to
open a master document from Windows Explorer, bringing it into Word, then
save the document under a different name so that I can work on it. On my
system right now, there is no way to do this anymore. As soon as I hit F12
to invoke the "Save As..." dialog, Word will immediately crash.
Interestingly, this does not happen on the Office 2013 system I am using at
work. Go figure.

There are two other problems worth mentioning. First, in Word, the return
and delivery address edit boxes in the Envelopes dialog are not accessible
with any screen access program. You simply cannot read the text that may (or
may not) be in these boxes. Secondly, in Outlook 2013, the Signature
dialog's edit box is just as inaccessible to a nonvisual user as the
Envelopes edit boxes in Word.

These days, for new users, it is just about impossible to acquire Office
2010. This is most unfortunate inasmuch as I consider Office 2013 to be very
much a work in progress. I very much am looking forward to a service pack on
this from Microsoft.

Cordially,

Curtis Chong



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