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

[Dr. Denise M Robinson]

Curtis
You are right on the money with this. Microsoft is becoming more imaged
based as they "take" or try to take ideas from apple....which is not a good
thing at this point because it takes more sight to operate their software
(and apple has voice over)....I am hoping updates fix the problems
also....but...

 I will not let any of my students update to this ...yet...if ever if they
do not improve it. There are special key commands I have figured out around
those images, skydrive etc that you mention, but they are not intuitive. It
took me several tries and can teach others if they have upgraded and can't
go back, but in general I tell people to stick with windows 7 and office
2010...unless you just like a really good challenge and are ready to
memorize a new slew of commands; which is not a bad thing but you will need
to remember them because they are not intuitive.
Denise


On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Curtis Chong <curtischong at earthlink.net>wrote:

> 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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-- 
*Dr Denise*

Denise M. Robinson, TVI, Ph.D.
CEO, TechVision, LLC
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