It’s official: no RTL support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
Yesterday, in connection with the opening of Apple Expo in Paris, Microsoft has announced that Office 2008 for Mac will start shipping on January 15, 2008. However, on Mac Mojo, the blog for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, Microsoft’s Eric Paquin confirmed the following:
BiDi languages and Unicode support has not change since 2004.
Yes, you heard right: Office 2008 for Mac cannot handle right-to-left Unicode (for Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) any better than Office 2004 for Mac—which is to say, not at all. This is a serious setback for Microsoft, and an absolute impediment to my use of their software. A couple of years ago, a fellow brought a PowerPoint (Windows) presentation to a WECSOR conference, but he didn’t bring a laptop. The AV support staff at the host college was, well, not supporting very well—as in, the computers were all locked up or password-protected, with nobody around to provide the passwords. So I pulled out my macBook, hooked it up to the computer, fired up PowerPoint, and away we went … with all of the presenter’s Hebrew terribly garbled. Individual unpointed words still went the correct direction, but the order of words in the sentence was reversed.
Apple’s iWork ‘08 suite (which shipped in August ‘07) handles Unicode Hebrew reasonably well, and offers word processing (Pages), spreadsheet (Numbers), and presentations (Keynote—which is far and away better than PowerPoint in other respects as well) for $79, a much lower price than any level of Office 2008. Apple’s Mail application handles Unicode Hebrew reasonably well, too, and it’s bundled with the OS. (Safari is fine for unpointed Hebrew, but it doesn’t properly line up the niqqudim, so I use Camino instead.) Nisus Writer Pro ($79) is a little better than Pages on language support, a little worse in other respects (such as precise sizing and placing of graphic elements and tables). Mellel ($29) is horrible if you want any kind of real page layout capabilities other than simple inline graphics, but it runs rings around everything else in terms of its language support, and has become the word processor I use most often for anything involving Hebrew text.
I was really hoping that Office ‘08 for Mac would bring Microsoft’s Unicode RTL support up to the level of at least the Mac OS, if not Mellel—but now we know that there has been no advance over Office ‘04.
Some of you may be thinking, “Hey, Chris, just quit your whining. You have Pages and Mellel and Nisus. Just use [my favorite] one of those!” Well, that is what I do. For example, I produce all my quizzes and tests for Hebrew 330–331 in Mellel. Unfortunately, Mellel’s XML file format is not a standard medium of cross-platform exchange. Many book and journal editors these days ask for digital manuscripts in .doc format (it will be interesting to see whether they switch to .docx). Some of my programs can read/write .doc or .docx, but I don’t have a convenient way to preview any of those files that they create to check them for problems.
The Another big problem with Office ‘08 for Macintosh is the lack of Entourage support for e-mail accounts on Exchange servers. You don’t get any support for Exchange servers in the Home or Student/Teacher editions. You must buy the top-of-the-line Pro edition to get any Exchange support at all. As Brian wrote in a comment thread on the Mac BU blog:
So what if I’m a student and our campus uses exchange server, I’m stuck with paying the full $399 retail price? Wow, that’s harsh.
BobR followed up with:
What exactly does “Exchange Support” mean? I’m glad you’ve got your pricing done before you are willing to explain your features: Exactly how I would have done it.
And “eponymous” gets the final say, with a response to Brian:
But that $399 will buy you the top of the line, cutting edge state of the art Exchange support we’ve come to expect from …. oh, never mind.
Christopher Heard | Hebrew, computers and software
This sounds daft to me R-to-L and Hebrew Unicode support works fine in Office 2007, so it shouldn’t have been at all difficult to port it across, given how much time they have
You’re right Doug, it is daft. The reason it works in Office ‘07 on Windows, though, is because they’re tapping into the OS’s native support for it. But that’s just it: they shouldn’t have to port anything at all, since RTL support (complete with a wide variety of keyboard layouts) is already built into Mac OS X as well.
Oh, and Office ‘08 for Mac isn’t a port of Office ‘07 for Windows. It’s a completely different product as far as the code is concerned. In fact, according to postings on the Mac BU blog (unless there’s been an update I’ve missed), the version of Office ‘08 that ships in January ‘08 won’t actually be able to read Office ‘07 .docx files without a special converter … to be released sometime later! (I do hope that much has changed.)
Wow, I was hoping to make the switch (grudgingly) to Word but now I’ll have to rethink this. What a pain.
Don’t forget that there’s also Neooffice, which handles RTL, like all openoffice “offsprings” rather naturally. IBM promises that its version of the program, Lotus Symphony (which does support RTL, even if the option is hidden) will have a mac version soon. Maybe this will put the issue to rest.
It’s easy - Parallels, XP and Office for windows
Alan, I actually prefer VMWare Fusion to Parallels. But why on earth would I want to install a foreign OS in order to run a word processor—especially when my native OS handles the job? The outrageous thing is that MS has not improved its Mac products’ Unicode support since 2004 and apparently has no intention of doing so. By now, robust Unicode support ought to be considered a core technology, a sine qua non for a commercial word processor with international distribution. Mellel does it splendidly for $29, but the $400 package from MS can’t handle it? Let’s face it: MS Word’s dominance as the de facto standard is due to marketing and market manipulation, not technological (code) superiority. And it makes me angry that editors in a profession that radically depends on the ability to use non-Roman alphabets perpetuates the dominance of the substandard.
dear christopher. i have just bought a mac and found out this horrible hebrew problem. will vnm+XP+office (i own copies of the latter two) do the job - or will i still be hampered?
being a journalist i can not compromise at all…
Ronen, the emulation issue you suggested should work fine. You could also try Nisus Writer Pro, NeoOffice, and Mellel as Mac native products. I personally use Mellel unless I have to share with PC users.
thanks. i would have to go with office - as writing is my bread winner
TextEdit, although its functionality is rather limited, handles RTL scripts well, and also supports the Nastaliq form of Arabic script (so does Mellel, but NeoOffice doesn’t yet). I too am disappointed that M$ Office won’t have RTL support. Also I’m assuming that M$ Office 2008 will not have improved support for indic scripts (DevanÄgarÄ«, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, etc.)
I have had a chance to work quite a bit with the beta of Office 2008 and I can confidently say that it works terribly with hebrew. It’s a shame because I’ve been waiting for proper support for years, and it just doesn’t seem to arrive. To be honest, the only real changes I’ve noticed in the beta version have been cosmetic changes and better compatibility with .docx files created on Office 2007 for windows - but of course that compatibility crumbles away when one realises that RTL languages are not invited to the party.
In fact, since Office 2008 has no Visual Basic support (a huge step back from 2004), the only reason I can think of for actually purchasing MSO08 is the intel processor support. Hardly worth the money. I’ll be sticking to NeoOffice and look forward to the Aqua/Mac port of OpenOffice (http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html).
[...] according to Chris Heard Word on the Mac has failed to implement the multilingual features Windows users have been taking [...]
I am horrified to learn that Word 08 does not support Hebrew. I only just got it when my hard disk crashed, the previous version would put all the sentences in backwards as Chris described but at least it was usable for inserting a Hebrew word or two in a long English text. There is only one solution and that is to use Indesign. I am not at all keen on Nisuswriter which has too many graphics features that really belong in a DTP program.
Josephine, have you tried Mellel? It is inexpensive, and doesn’t emphasize graphics features.
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