Arabic writing in OFFICE 2008

[s2000]

hii guys

i installed office 2008 in my mac and i want to write in arabic it does but the letters are not connected to each other there is a way that i can write arabic properly??

Cheers!

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Well it doesn't support Arabic as it should be, if you need to have alternative solutions, you may read the topic here.

[s2000]

Thanks Zaid

[kkhosni]

It's true, arabic not working with word and excel but working with powerpoint

[pasaporte]

are there any update!

[fangpyre]

No updates that resolve this issue.
And I don't expect any to come.
This is a huge overhaul of the Office framework.

Consider other alternatives like:
- OpenOffice.org
- NeoOffice
- iWork (Arabic works, but not full functionality)

[Magnus]

are there any update!

There is a brief article about it in February's Shufflegazine from when we spoke to Microsoft at Macworld about this issue.

[pasaporte]

thanks to all who reply.

[DXB Law]

thanks to all who reply.

Just to clarify, the disconnected letters are not due to a bug in Office that can be fixed in an update. They are due to the fact that MS Office for Mac does not support right-to-left languages, which includes Arabic, Persian and the language used in a certain other Middle Eastern country. This has been the case since Office 2004. There was some hope, which turned out to be unfounded, that MS was going to address this issue when it rolled out Office 2008, but sadly MS did not do so.

Although iWork doesn't support Arabic very well either, Text Edit, Mail and most other native Mac applications support Arabic quite nicely.

That said, there is currently no good way to do heavy-duty word Arabic processing on a Mac. Every solution involves some degree of compromise.

1) Nisus Writer Express is a reasonably priced word processor for Mac. I like Nisus. It handles lots of languages and has an interface that is easy to learn for those used to working with MS Word. Documents are stored as rich text files (.rtf) which makes it fairly easy for Word users to open them. However, Nisus handles formatting slightly differently than MS Word, so if you are exchanging soft copies with Windows users for collaboration, be prepared for paragraphs appearing to reverse direction, table/column formatting not working properly and other glitches.

2) NeoOffice has the advantage of being free and constantly under development by a large user community worldwide. But it, too, has compatibility problems with MS Word.

3) Some have recommended Mellel. I'm not very familiar with it and don't use it myself, but the developers of Mellel have posted an interesting and informative competitive comparison between Mellel, NeoOffice, MS Word for Mac and Nisus Writer express here.

4) If you need interoperability with MS Word for Windows users, then probably the least bad alternative is to run MS Office for Windows in a Windows environment. I have a Windows XP virtual machine running under Parallels that I use for this purpose. The main disadvantage here is cost and inconvenience, but you can be reasonably confident that docs you edit will look the same way when you send them to your Windows friends and colleagues. Plus, running MS Office for Windows gets you the whole suite (excel, powerpoint, etc.). There are spreadsheet and presentation applications in the Open Office package, but not under Nisus or Mellel.

[pasaporte]

DXB Law, thanks a lot.