If you go with Office, shoot for 2013; the extra PDF support alone is worth the price of admission.
Ted From: Brian Vogel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 25, 2016 6:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: buying Microsoft Office first time 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
