I tend to agree with Brian, and I can tell you that OpenOffice works
quite well with JAWS now. That wasn't always the case. It doesn't come
with a mail program, but you could use Thunderbird for that purpose, and
it apparently now comes with a calendar, although I don't use that
function at all.
If you're planning to enter the corporate world, you almost have to
learn Office and Outlook, but that's not where you are heading in life,
OpenOffice works quite well for home use. I know that LibreOffice is a
fork from the old OpenOffice and is in some ways a little more feature
rich, but I've never tested it with JAWS.
Brad
On 1/25/2016 5:39 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:
Bob,
The first version of MS-Office with the Ribbon is Office
2007, which gives you an idea of how long ago the ribbon became the
default. Even if you were able to secure a copy Office 2003 I would
strongly suggest you don't. Official support for Office 2003 ended in
2014, and no one, including Freedom Scientific, is doing their ongoing
development on top of non-supported versions of Office. I'd suggest
Office 2010, which has extended support through 2020, or Office 2013,
which has extended support through 2023.
I prefer a version of Office that's fully installed
locally on the machine, and I think that Office 2013 was the last
version that worked entirely locally. Office 365 has a lot of
web-based features and I think Office 2016 does, too, though I can't
speak to that in detail.
You may want to consider either LibreOffice
<https://www.libreoffice.org/> or OpenOffice <http://openoffice.org>,
as opposed to Microsoft Office, if cost is a factor and/or you just
want to get a sense of what a full office suite is like. Freedom
Scientific should be able to tell you whether there is any JAWS
support for either LibreOffice or OpenOffice, but those are the two
biggest competitors to Microsoft Office and both are open-source
projects that have been around for quite a while and that have large
user bases. Both of these suites can open files generated by MS-Office.
Brian
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