Hi Phil Actually, looking back at that demo I'm a little embarrassed about it because, although I did the demo, it was done kind of ad-lib, and as you'll have heard I got a couple of surprises myself along the way. But keep in mind that that particular demo was done using a very very early version of Fusion, before most Mac users had even heard of the product as I was working with VMWare on their private betas at the time and, therefore, I was able to have a lot of input regarding accessibility. The interface has changed and I wouldn't be so arrogant as to claim the credit. However, when I first started looking at the product, Fusion was only slightly better in terms of accessibility than Parallels Desktop was, (and still is). I had several long conversations at the time with VMWare's development team and by the finish of it all, Fusion was almost 100% accessible. That, I am pleased to say, has not changed.
I got a lot of feedback from that demo and almost all of it was positive. In fact, I was told that in several cases that demo persuaded people to launch themselves into the Mac fraternity and, as a result, many of those people are now hard and fast Mac enthusiasts and I know quite a few of them personally who have now even ditched Windows completely. Regarding your comments on spreadsheets, there is another, possibly more accessible, product on the market than Apple's own and many use it in preference to Numbers. It's called "Tables", and it will allow you to import Microsoft spreadsheets I believe, although I am not entirely sure whether they've yet enabled the use of Office 2010 or 2013 spreadsheets. Anyway, before I forget, you might want to give it a spin. you can find the developer's website along with download links to try it for yourself here: <http://www.x-tables.eu/more/overview.html> I doubt that it would take you long to learn and I think you'll agree that it is accessible. Once again, thanks for the congratulations on the demo, although I personally cannot stand to listen to it now, as when I recorded that I had a nasal condition and my voice sounds utterly horrible, even in comparison to how it sounds now! ;-) Oh, and regarding your Windows license. If you're using XP you can probably just install it as many times as you like now. But there's no way to "free up" a licence. You would need to probably contact MS is you are using Windows 7 in order to activate it again. But I still hold with what I said in that demo about dynamic virtual drives. It's more economical to do it that way than to use Boot Camp. Not to mention the convenience of having cross-platform on-the-fly access to documents and files. Personally, I won't even consider using Boot Camp again. It is wasteful and not a very efficient means of getting around the problem of cross-platform accessibility in my humble opinion. I'm not going to stray off topic and discuss screen-readers for other platforms. However, you would need to uninstall Jaws I think in order to install it in Fusion. So it makes me wonder what the point is in keeping a Boot Camp partition in those circumstances. But for our own systems, I am happy with the way we're doing things now. We have a VM archived I believe for when Lynne wants to do testing. But ordinarily we now use a real PC for Windows. That's because I am back into broadcasting and also Braille transcription. I wouldn't dare try either, to be honest, within a virtual machine and as I said I won't use Boot Camp. Gordon On 13 Nov 2012, at 00:49, Phil Halton <[email protected]> wrote: Just listened to the VM Demo in its entirety, and I have to say, Gordon did a fine job demonstrating VMWare. I bought my first Mac this summer, after having used JAWS and Windows since the DOS days. My iPhone's accessibility was the deciding factor in my decision to purchase the iMac. My principle use of computers these days is reading and writing documents, and making extensive use of spreadsheets for all manner of tasks involving the manipulation of text and data. Unfortunately, I don't see any reason to learn an entirely new productivity suite like Apple's iWork, since I know and use MS Office extensively. I like the Mac iTunes and iMovie apps and I'm sure there are others I'll get to know and use, but for productivity, I can't beat the combination of MS Office and JAWS. Now enter VMWare Fusion. The demo makes me want to give the VMWare Fusion trial version another shot, this time installing windows as a guest instead of using my existing bootcamp. But, I think I'd have to either first remove the bootcamp to free up the license, or, buy another Windows license to install windows7 as a guest - and I'm a little shakey on both. I've got half my 500GB drive dedicated to bootcamp, and the other to MAC OS X. In all my days, I've never exceeded 50 GB on a system drive, so I don't feel too constrained by this arrangement. I've also got a 2 terabyte firewire800 drive apportioned half to each system, so I feel I have ample storage. As it stands then, I have two systems in one iMac hardware package, and but for the minor inconvenience of having to reboot to access the other OS, and remembering the minor keyboard differences, it's working well for me. Well, I just wanted to congratulate Gordon on a fine job with the demo, and give my thoughts on the Mac from the perspective of a long time DOS/Windows user. <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. 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