Odd problems running Office 2007 in Windows 7 Ultimate

Anna_Hayward

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Jan 25, 2012
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Hello,
I recently upgraded my mother's computer to Windows 7 Ultimate edition, as I was advised that it was not necessary to re-install applications.

This is important as my mother is registered blind and uses specialist screen reading software and magnification, which is a nightmare to install and set up.

Everything works fine, except Microsoft Word 2007, which is very glitchy. For instance, the font is too large (causes problems for her screen reader), the screen seems to 'wave' and flicker a lot, and she is unable to block-out text for cutting & pasting, editing etc. and it seems to freeze on occasions.

She has a powerful, quad-core gaming-type computer (bespoke), 8Gb RAM, 4Gb of video RAM, massive hard disk etc. Every other program works fine, including WordPad (which we used just to check it wasn't word processors in general). Internet Explorer 9 is brilliant and no problems with other applications. It's just Microsoft Office Word that is problematic.

Please do not suggest we use non-Microsoft products as they are incompatible with her specialist software. Thank you for any ideas.
 

Anna_Hayward

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Yes, I bought it from Software4Students (my mum's an OU student). And I haven't tried re-installing MS Office because I Googled it and discovered a lot of people have reported major problems in re-installing it.

 

DavidThncus

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Dec 26, 2011
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Hi Anna,

My mother is legally blind and has a very difficult time viewing/reading her PC screen.
Can you tell me what software you use for "specialist screen reading software and magnification"?
My mother has Vista, and I connect to her remotely with TeamViewer.

Thanks! David
 

Anna_Hayward

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She uses Supernova Plus, from Dolphin http://www.yourdolphin.com/productdetail.asp?id=1, which greatly magnifies text, without pixilating it, and also reads text to the user.

She also uses Kurzweill 1000 http://www.kurzweiledu.com/kurzweil-1000-v12-windows.html, which can read scanned documents or PDFs, out loud. It can also transfer any text, including PDFs into a user-defined text and background.

Both applications are phenomenally expensive, and take a powerful machine to run, but are invaluable for my mother's independence.
 

DavidThncus

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Thank You - I'll look into these.

One thing I have found to help my mother is using Firefox browser with the "NoSquint" add-on.
With NoSquint you can set "Full Zoom Level" and "Text Zoom Level" per site.
Firefox and NoSquint are both free, so you could try them yourself...

My mother can read web pages, but not easily.
I have no idea if this might help with what you are using now.
Just a thought...
 

Anna_Hayward

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Jan 25, 2012
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Thank you everyone. We tried a few of these ideas, but they didn't work, so my mother has decided to upgrade to the latest version of Office. We hope that won't cause any problems with Windows 7.