Arabic/Farsi in Office 2004 (Word and Excel)

[Farzad]

How do you setup Word 2004 and Excel 2004 to type right to left in
arabic or farsi. I have enabled Farsi and arabic in the international
pane of the System Preferences and I am able to type perfectly ok in
TextEdit. However when I type Arabic or Farsi in Word 2004 the
characters appear but they do not connect to one another as they do in
TextEdit.

Any ideas on how to fix this??

 

[Benjamin Amsaleg]

You can not type right to left in Office:Mac yet. This is certainly
something to expect from the next version of Office:Mac...
With Office:2004 dating from mid 2004, I can expect that the next Office
might come out between mid 2006 and mid 2007...

In the mid time, I recommand you to test NeoOffice/J. Neo Office support
right to left and is able to work with Office document in a reasonable
manner.

NeoOffice is free, but donation are accepted.

You can get it at
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php

It can even be customized with an Arabic interface!

And yes, it works on Tiger and you can install Spotlight extension to index
native OpenOffice.org formatted document!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Right to left is not supported in Office 2004, so you cannot enable this.
Sorry. You can't do anything about the failure to connect the characters,
either.

Look into a word processor called Mellel, right-to-left is one of the
reasons it was created, I think.
http://www.mellel.com/

If you want more information, none of which is likely to be helpful, you can
use google groups to search the archives
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?q=group:*mac.office