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Yes this is an important issue and one that we'll surely bring up with them. I hope the discussions today will give us some better contacts so we can get better help with problems and answers to questions.
Keep adding questions and concerns.
The title says it all.
Mac users have been using MS office since it was introduced on our platform in the 80's and we believe many of us will continue to do so. However when it comes to Middle East support for local languages we find MS office on Windows supports Arabic while the one on Mac doesn't!
Before OSX, MS Office used to handle Arabic in a good way (Arabic wasn't fully supported), but since Mac OSX we didn't see the same service.
I do think it is not a big issue to solve in the office engine to make it support Arabic, yet this is something waiting for clarifications by Microsoft's Mac division themselves.
Yes this is an important issue and one that we'll surely bring up with them. I hope the discussions today will give us some better contacts so we can get better help with problems and answers to questions.
Keep adding questions and concerns.
Last edited by Magnus; 21st March 2008 at 08:54.
Hi, so the MS Office for MAC 2008 still does not work with Arabic?
The short answer: no.
The long answer:
Word: NO!
Excel: yes, but no right to left sheets.
Powerpoint: yes, but you might need to change fonts.
Entourage: kind of
Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.
Ok, thanks for reply. I'll go for Nisus then - is it obvious how it works once installed or do I just have to download it and follow instructions?
agree that fact that Word X or 2008 does not do Arabic well, especially when opening files orginally done on a Windows machine. which is a real issue.
However, a few 'tricks' I have discovered that if you open an Windows Arabic document in X or 08 -- it will not be formated correctly and in X it displays as lines with no Arabic characters. However, if copy the Arabic and paste it into a Mail, or Pages or other native Mac program the Arabic will copy and display properly.
It is not a solution for originating Arabic, but if you need to read or recover Arabic text sent you -- AND reply to it by editing you can within an email or other format.
However, if you try to edit, even English text in the Arabic Word document and save it -- most of the time at minimum the formating will be screwed up when opening in Windows.
There have been always a work around to open Arabic Word. Adobe InDesign reads Arabic MS documents perfectly even if it contains tables, foot notes, headers and footers.
But what each and every Mac user could do, is open incoming Arabic MS Word files in Text Edit free program that comes with OSX, or even more you may type full Arabic letter, report with full formatting elements in Text Edit, then export as .doc
When you open an incoming Arabic MS Word file you can choose Text Encoding from the open dialogue window in case Text Edit failed to select the right encoding.
Wish it was as good as their windows applications ..
Microsoft Products and Arabic Support
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