Word 2008 - does it do right-to-left text

[John Lockwood]

Microsoft are deafening us with silence over whether Word 2008 will
[finally] do right-to-left text entry as needed for example by Arabic and
Hebrew languages.

Does anyone here know the answer?

Or are Microsoft going to screw Mac customers [again].

 

[Michel Bintener]

Up to this point, Microsoft have not released that much information on
Office 2008, so it is still uncertain whether Word is going to support RTL
text entry or not. Maybe someone who is/was at Macworld asked them, and if
they got an answer, they might post it in here. Keep checking this
newsgroup.

Microsoft are deafening us with silence over whether Word 2008 will
[finally] do right-to-left text entry as needed for example by Arabic and
Hebrew languages.

Does anyone here know the answer?

Or are Microsoft going to screw Mac customers [again].

--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:Mac (Entourage & Word)

***Always reply to the newsgroup.***

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now

Cheers

Microsoft are deafening us with silence over whether Word 2008 will
[finally] do right-to-left text entry as needed for example by Arabic and
Hebrew languages.

Does anyone here know the answer?

Or are Microsoft going to screw Mac customers [again].

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Nope. Nothing at Macworld on this.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>
My Site: <http://www.bethrosengard.com>

 

[John Lockwood]

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now

This is the excuse that Microsoft have been using for years and initially
was a VALID excuse in that Mac OS X prior to Jaguar didn't really do
right-to-left at all, Jaguar did it poorly but Panther fairly well and Tiger
does it perfectly.

This is evidenced by the multiplicity of other word processors for the Mac
which DO support right-to-left text (e.g. Mellel see
http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html and Nisus Writer see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/ ).

So as I stated Microsoft are having to re-write Word anyway, and no longer
have an excuse for not adding this feature. Any failure to do so would in my
opinion reflect a DELIBERATE decision to [not] do so (i.e. to deliberately
continue to disadvantage Mac users).

The Israeli government has already practically declared war once before over
this issue (see http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/10/15.4.shtml ), I
am surprised the Arabic world has not similarly declared a Jihad against
Microsoft over this! After all several Arabic publications use Macs
including Al Jazeera! See http://www.ameinfo.com/102511.html

Note: NeoOffice also supports right-to-left text, it will very soon [far,
far sooner than Microsoft] support Open XML files, and it will also support
some VBA in its spreadsheet module whereas Excel 2008 will not. Its also
ALREADY available as a native Intel version.

It is incredible that Microsoft keep boasting they have the biggest team of
Mac developers outside Apple and yet produce so very few products [the
number of which continues to shrink] and not even particularly good products
either.

Ultimately Microsoft's patently deliberate crippling of their Mac software
is I feel counter-productive. A Mac user will look at their obviously
crippled products (e.g. MS Messenger) and think - Microsoft obviously are
not very good at writing software its a good thing I am not using Windows as
that must be crap as well. A Windows user can look at iTunes on Windows and
see a full quality non crippled application that is far easier to use than
WMP and has more features than WMP. They can then think, blimey if that's
how good their free software is for Windows imagine how good the rest of
their software for their own operating system must be. Hence the
[increasing] number of switchers to the Mac.

I would also say that historically having a GOOD cross-platform offering has
been a major reason for several software products succeeding over others
which did not (e.g. Quicken vs. MS Money, Excel vs. Lotus 123). This is one
of the main reasons Office succeeded in the first place and quite possibly
why iTunes is succeeding now. This is a lesson Microsoft have clearly
forgotten and the result will likely be far fewer sales of Office 2008
upgrades than Microsoft presumably expect. I as an IT Manager certainly see
no justification so far for spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading
all our users.

 

[Phillip Jones]

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now

This is the excuse that Microsoft have been using for years and initially
was a VALID excuse in that Mac OS X prior to Jaguar didn't really do
right-to-left at all, Jaguar did it poorly but Panther fairly well and Tiger
does it perfectly.

This is evidenced by the multiplicity of other word processors for the Mac
which DO support right-to-left text (e.g. Mellel see
http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html and Nisus Writer see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/ ).

So as I stated Microsoft are having to re-write Word anyway, and no longer
have an excuse for not adding this feature. Any failure to do so would in my
opinion reflect a DELIBERATE decision to [not] do so (i.e. to deliberately
continue to disadvantage Mac users).

The Israeli government has already practically declared war once before over
this issue (see http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/10/15.4.shtml ), I
am surprised the Arabic world has not similarly declared a Jihad against
Microsoft over this! After all several Arabic publications use Macs
including Al Jazeera! See http://www.ameinfo.com/102511.html

Note: NeoOffice also supports right-to-left text, it will very soon [far,
far sooner than Microsoft] support Open XML files, and it will also support
some VBA in its spreadsheet module whereas Excel 2008 will not. Its also
ALREADY available as a native Intel version.

It is incredible that Microsoft keep boasting they have the biggest team of
Mac developers outside Apple and yet produce so very few products [the
number of which continues to shrink] and not even particularly good products
either.

Ultimately Microsoft's patently deliberate crippling of their Mac software
is I feel counter-productive. A Mac user will look at their obviously
crippled products (e.g. MS Messenger) and think - Microsoft obviously are
not very good at writing software its a good thing I am not using Windows as
that must be crap as well. A Windows user can look at iTunes on Windows and
see a full quality non crippled application that is far easier to use than
WMP and has more features than WMP. They can then think, blimey if that's
how good their free software is for Windows imagine how good the rest of
their software for their own operating system must be. Hence the
[increasing] number of switchers to the Mac.

I would also say that historically having a GOOD cross-platform offering has
been a major reason for several software products succeeding over others
which did not (e.g. Quicken vs. MS Money, Excel vs. Lotus 123). This is one
of the main reasons Office succeeded in the first place and quite possibly
why iTunes is succeeding now. This is a lesson Microsoft have clearly
forgotten and the result will likely be far fewer sales of Office 2008
upgrades than Microsoft presumably expect. I as an IT Manager certainly see
no justification so far for spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading
all our users.

I expect here you are talking to choir as opposed to congregation. You
do know since the time The two Steve's (Apple) snubbed Bill (Microsoft)
when he asked to be part of Apple, Mr Gates has had a hatred of Apple.
And because of this past grudge, he has endeavored to Mac Apple and Mac
users life miserable. There is no excuse, all features on one platform,
any platform should be exactly the same on all platforms. If right to
left works on the UNIX, LINUX, Windows version it should work in the Mac
version. IF a feature created and works in Mac version it should work on
the others. There should be none other than cosmetic to account for the
OS Look and feel. At One point MS was at the point it could have shut
down Apple and rejoiced for doing so. But There was this little thing in
the Federal Government about antitrust. His, Lawyers suggested that
maybe he should leave Apple alone if he didn't want MS Broken up like
AT&T. So The Mac Business Unit only designs enough to keep us
relatively satisfied by orders from the top. No one here will admit that
the MacBU is on a short leash. The reason for not having certain
features work is so Mac users will become feed up and switch to MS and
leave the apple fold. I am a stubborn old cuss and I will die first
before I buy a Windows product. If all Mac users were that way and
loudly put put a fuss maybe thing would be better. But I am doubting it.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Elliott Roper]

I expect here you are talking to choir as opposed to congregation. You
do know since the time The two Steve's (Apple) snubbed Bill (Microsoft)
when he asked to be part of Apple, Mr Gates has had a hatred of Apple.
And because of this past grudge, he has endeavored to Mac Apple and Mac
users life miserable. There is no excuse, all features on one platform,
any platform should be exactly the same on all platforms. If right to
left works on the UNIX, LINUX, Windows version it should work in the Mac
version. IF a feature created and works in Mac version it should work on
the others. There should be none other than cosmetic to account for the
OS Look and feel. At One point MS was at the point it could have shut
down Apple and rejoiced for doing so. But There was this little thing in
the Federal Government about antitrust. His, Lawyers suggested that
maybe he should leave Apple alone if he didn't want MS Broken up like
AT&T. So The Mac Business Unit only designs enough to keep us
relatively satisfied by orders from the top. No one here will admit that
the MacBU is on a short leash. The reason for not having certain
features work is so Mac users will become feed up and switch to MS and
leave the apple fold. I am a stubborn old cuss and I will die first
before I buy a Windows product. If all Mac users were that way and
loudly put put a fuss maybe thing would be better. But I am doubting it.

Phillip, if you have any hard first hand evidence for any of this, most
of the world's financial newspapers will offer to make you quite rich.
Don't whatever you do, publish your first hand information here.
Ppp...play hardball with those press barons.

I'd guess you have never worked in software design and implementation.
While some of what you say has a remote feeble glimmer of veracity,
most is that which is emitted from the south end of a northbound horse.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

There is no excuse, all features on one platform, any platform should
be exactly the same on all platforms. If right to left works on the
UNIX, LINUX, Windows version it should work in the Mac version.

Uh... say WHAT?

I suppose that means that you're stridently endorsing implementation of
ActiveX controls for MacOffice?

Whose responsibility is it to make sure that WinOffice apps respond
appropriately to AppleEvents?

What should MacOffice's VBA MacScript() command do in WinOffice?

How exactly should Mac OS Creator Codes be used for file I/O routines in
WinOffice apps?

And when the cost of implementing a WinOffice feature set on the Mac
amounts to more than the lifetime expected profit from all sales of
MacOffice, who gets hurt by the rational decision to discontinue
MacOffice?

I know you're mostly venting, Phillip, but really...

 

[JE McGimpsey]

So The Mac Business Unit only designs enough to keep us relatively
satisfied by orders from the top. No one here will admit that the
MacBU is on a short leash.

This is absolute nonsense. MacBU's a business unit of MS, same as any
other - if they can make a profit, they'll be given the resources to do
so.

The short leash is the market - it makes no sense to spend more on
development than they can recoup in sales.

MS isn't a charity - directors could go to jail for ignoring their
fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

There's no credible scenario under which bringing MacOffice to parity
with WinOffice (e.g., developing Mac versions of Access, Visio, ActiveX,
Live Office, FrontPage, or updating MacVBA, etc.) makes business sense.

Conspiracy fantasies may be fun to indulge in, but they're not necessary
in this case, nor, IMO, are they remotely accurate.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi John:

We have to be careful to constrain ourselves to the facts here, otherwise we
just set Phillip off again

Changing text direction is such a fundamental change in an application that
it must be designed in from the ground up. The fact that Apple has finally
released full support for RTL means that other vendors can "begin" to do
that design work.

My understanding is that Nissus and Mellel wrote their own right-to-left
routines because the Apple ones didn't work. And by doing so, I am sure
they improved their sales by 200 or 300 per cent. If Microsoft were to do
the same thing for Mac Office, they could expect to improve Office sales by
0.033 per cent.

The fact that we WANT them to do that does not alter the fact that the board
of directors might well go to jail if they approved the project

Of course, as an IT Manager, you already know the following, but I will
include it here to avoid setting Phillip off We need to be careful of
the term "re-write" when applied to a piece of software with 30 million
lines of code in it Under those conditions, the objective becomes "Do
everything possible to AVOID re-writing it." Otherwise, you go broke.

The very clear direction from on high for Office 2008 will be something like
"Take Windows Office 2007, remove the products that are too hard, remove the
features that are not needed on the Mac, then make as few changes as
possible to get the rest of it to simply 'work'"

So: If Apple RTL support is now sufficiently complete that Microsoft can
simply unhook the Windows RTL support module from Office 2008 and hook up
the OS X one, then OF COURSE they will do it. It might get them 100,000 new
sales. Some of them to Al Quaida and the Israeli government. But if we're
talking about a team of 100 developers working through every module, every
dialogue box, every line of code that puts something on the screen and
changing the way it operates to fit in with Apple's RTL support, then it's
not going to happen. There's not enough sales to fund it.

I wonder if the same enthusiasm will be evident at Apple, which just
announced a mobile phone without enough rows on the keyboard to support
accented characters, let alone RTL languages...

I richly enjoyed the Apple marketing slogan "Think Different". But the user
base for which Microsoft Office was made saw it as a "Warning Label" and
recoiled in horror. I think Apple quickly understood that it made a
horrible mistake there, and jumped back itself pretty quickly. But it will
take a few years for their user base to come on board. On the other hand, I
do enjoy the PC with a cold vs Mac adds currently running. I'm typing this
in the Mac while the latest PC sits on the desk beside me hacking and
spluttering while I fill it up with Penicillin

I don't know why you believe that Microsoft Office does not support ODI. It
already does, along with any other XML-based format for which you possess a
DTD and a Transform. The only change forthcoming is a translator to enable
users to convert between the two.

I will agree that Messenger for Mac is deliberately crippled Of course
it is. And it will stay that way until Apple allows it into .Mac and AOL
allows it into AIM. Right after that, expect it to suddenly uncripple
itself.

After spending some time with Windows Media Player 11, I have decided that
it's not a bad product. It has some nice bells and whistles that iTunes
doesn't offer.

I think there is one reason I can give you to spend your money on Office
2008. The Open XML file format. If I said to you "You will get no more
corrupt documents, and no more interchange with Windows problems" I think
you would consider it. You may wait to see what they really deliver: but I
still think you'll grab your checkbook.

Of course, I may be wrong. If Mellel and Nissus Writer will do all that
your users need, you could save yourself a bundle. But few companies in my
experience have needs that limited.

Cheers

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now

This is the excuse that Microsoft have been using for years and initially
was a VALID excuse in that Mac OS X prior to Jaguar didn't really do
right-to-left at all, Jaguar did it poorly but Panther fairly well and Tiger
does it perfectly.

This is evidenced by the multiplicity of other word processors for the Mac
which DO support right-to-left text (e.g. Mellel see
http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html and Nisus Writer see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/ ).

So as I stated Microsoft are having to re-write Word anyway, and no longer
have an excuse for not adding this feature. Any failure to do so would in my
opinion reflect a DELIBERATE decision to [not] do so (i.e. to deliberately
continue to disadvantage Mac users).

The Israeli government has already practically declared war once before over
this issue (see http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/10/15.4.shtml ), I
am surprised the Arabic world has not similarly declared a Jihad against
Microsoft over this! After all several Arabic publications use Macs
including Al Jazeera! See http://www.ameinfo.com/102511.html

Note: NeoOffice also supports right-to-left text, it will very soon [far,
far sooner than Microsoft] support Open XML files, and it will also support
some VBA in its spreadsheet module whereas Excel 2008 will not. Its also
ALREADY available as a native Intel version.

It is incredible that Microsoft keep boasting they have the biggest team of
Mac developers outside Apple and yet produce so very few products [the
number of which continues to shrink] and not even particularly good products
either.

Ultimately Microsoft's patently deliberate crippling of their Mac software
is I feel counter-productive. A Mac user will look at their obviously
crippled products (e.g. MS Messenger) and think - Microsoft obviously are
not very good at writing software its a good thing I am not using Windows as
that must be crap as well. A Windows user can look at iTunes on Windows and
see a full quality non crippled application that is far easier to use than
WMP and has more features than WMP. They can then think, blimey if that's
how good their free software is for Windows imagine how good the rest of
their software for their own operating system must be. Hence the
[increasing] number of switchers to the Mac.

I would also say that historically having a GOOD cross-platform offering has
been a major reason for several software products succeeding over others
which did not (e.g. Quicken vs. MS Money, Excel vs. Lotus 123). This is one
of the main reasons Office succeeded in the first place and quite possibly
why iTunes is succeeding now. This is a lesson Microsoft have clearly
forgotten and the result will likely be far fewer sales of Office 2008
upgrades than Microsoft presumably expect. I as an IT Manager certainly see
no justification so far for spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading
all our users.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John Lockwood]

Some valid points made there John.

However Microsoft keep boasting they are the biggest Mac developer team
outside Apple and yet they cannot (apparently) manage to do what much MUCH
smaller teams have. As I pointed out NeoOffice already can do r-t-l on a Mac
and will soon do Open XML and even VBA all Intel native on a Mac.

Microsoft after all can no longer claim their Mac developer team has to
split their efforts doing lots of products.

By the way, I believe Nisus Writer Express at least purely uses the built-in
Tiger routines since it says that (to do it) it requires Tiger.

Even none r-t-l languages like Russian (Cyrillic), Welsh, and Greek don't
really work in Word 2004 because it still does not do Unicode. Apple's free
TextEdit (the Mac equivalent of Windows WordPad) does a better job with such
Word files!

There maybe a cost to Microsoft for adding rtl support but as they are
having to clean up the code anyway I don't believe it would have been as big
as you think IF they had made the decision to kill two birds with one stone.
It is also the case that Office 2008 currently offers practically nothing to
entice people to upgrade.

We already know we are going to loose VBA support (which even though we are
a 100% Mac site we use in both Word and Excel internally, and we also need
to be exchange files with PC users). Intel nativeness is nice to have but
Office 2004 works fine (with VBA as well) in Rosetta. Therefore being native
is not itself sufficient justification to pay for an upgrade.

The ONLY reason left from my perspective for upgrading (since we are loosing
VBA, and apparently not getting better language support) would be if
Microsoft had taken the opportunity of having to substantially re-write
Office to move to Xcode and as a result FINALLY killed off the
hundreds/THOUSANDS of ancient bugs we still suffer from (see
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/MSKBKnownIssues.html for just a few of them). In
particular Office 2004 still has major problems with Apple servers.
Unfortunately does anyone seriously believe Microsoft are actually going to
fix these bugs? (Some of which are 20+ years old!)

I really cannot see any justification for spending tens of thousands of
dollars (or UK equivalent) upgrading our company to Office 2008 for such a
mediocre upgrade.

I take your comment on board about Microsoft in the past undertaking to
continue Office for Mac at a time when Apple were in serious trouble.
However things have changed, if Microsoft discontinued Office for Mac TODAY
I would not have the slightest worry and might instead say thank god!

Hi John:

We have to be careful to constrain ourselves to the facts here, otherwise we
just set Phillip off again

Changing text direction is such a fundamental change in an application that
it must be designed in from the ground up. The fact that Apple has finally
released full support for RTL means that other vendors can "begin" to do
that design work.

My understanding is that Nissus and Mellel wrote their own right-to-left
routines because the Apple ones didn't work. And by doing so, I am sure
they improved their sales by 200 or 300 per cent. If Microsoft were to do
the same thing for Mac Office, they could expect to improve Office sales by
0.033 per cent.

The fact that we WANT them to do that does not alter the fact that the board
of directors might well go to jail if they approved the project

Of course, as an IT Manager, you already know the following, but I will
include it here to avoid setting Phillip off We need to be careful of
the term "re-write" when applied to a piece of software with 30 million
lines of code in it Under those conditions, the objective becomes "Do
everything possible to AVOID re-writing it." Otherwise, you go broke.

The very clear direction from on high for Office 2008 will be something like
"Take Windows Office 2007, remove the products that are too hard, remove the
features that are not needed on the Mac, then make as few changes as
possible to get the rest of it to simply 'work'"

So: If Apple RTL support is now sufficiently complete that Microsoft can
simply unhook the Windows RTL support module from Office 2008 and hook up
the OS X one, then OF COURSE they will do it. It might get them 100,000 new
sales. Some of them to Al Quaida and the Israeli government. But if we're
talking about a team of 100 developers working through every module, every
dialogue box, every line of code that puts something on the screen and
changing the way it operates to fit in with Apple's RTL support, then it's
not going to happen. There's not enough sales to fund it.

I wonder if the same enthusiasm will be evident at Apple, which just
announced a mobile phone without enough rows on the keyboard to support
accented characters, let alone RTL languages...

I richly enjoyed the Apple marketing slogan "Think Different". But the user
base for which Microsoft Office was made saw it as a "Warning Label" and
recoiled in horror. I think Apple quickly understood that it made a
horrible mistake there, and jumped back itself pretty quickly. But it will
take a few years for their user base to come on board. On the other hand, I
do enjoy the PC with a cold vs Mac adds currently running. I'm typing this
in the Mac while the latest PC sits on the desk beside me hacking and
spluttering while I fill it up with Penicillin

I don't know why you believe that Microsoft Office does not support ODI. It
already does, along with any other XML-based format for which you possess a
DTD and a Transform. The only change forthcoming is a translator to enable
users to convert between the two.

I will agree that Messenger for Mac is deliberately crippled Of course
it is. And it will stay that way until Apple allows it into .Mac and AOL
allows it into AIM. Right after that, expect it to suddenly uncripple
itself.

After spending some time with Windows Media Player 11, I have decided that
it's not a bad product. It has some nice bells and whistles that iTunes
doesn't offer.

I think there is one reason I can give you to spend your money on Office
2008. The Open XML file format. If I said to you "You will get no more
corrupt documents, and no more interchange with Windows problems" I think
you would consider it. You may wait to see what they really deliver: but I
still think you'll grab your checkbook.

Of course, I may be wrong. If Mellel and Nissus Writer will do all that
your users need, you could save yourself a bundle. But few companies in my
experience have needs that limited.

Cheers

Hi John:

Now, if Steve Jobs were to show Microsoft his design specification for
Pages, Microsoft may be a little more forthcoming about the feature set for
Word 2008

While we wait to find out, I invite you to reflect on this:

Word does right-to-left perfectly on the PC, and Mac Word is essentially a
port of the PC code. So the copy of Word you are using right now already
contains right-to-left support.

It's not working. It's disabled. Because something is missing. I leave
you to ponder what it is that might be missing, and which company should
have supplied it by now

This is the excuse that Microsoft have been using for years and initially
was a VALID excuse in that Mac OS X prior to Jaguar didn't really do
right-to-left at all, Jaguar did it poorly but Panther fairly well and Tiger
does it perfectly.

This is evidenced by the multiplicity of other word processors for the Mac
which DO support right-to-left text (e.g. Mellel see
http://www.redlers.com/mellelmultilingual.html and Nisus Writer see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/ ).

So as I stated Microsoft are having to re-write Word anyway, and no longer
have an excuse for not adding this feature. Any failure to do so would in my
opinion reflect a DELIBERATE decision to [not] do so (i.e. to deliberately
continue to disadvantage Mac users).

The Israeli government has already practically declared war once before over
this issue (see http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/10/15.4.shtml ), I
am surprised the Arabic world has not similarly declared a Jihad against
Microsoft over this! After all several Arabic publications use Macs
including Al Jazeera! See http://www.ameinfo.com/102511.html

Note: NeoOffice also supports right-to-left text, it will very soon [far,
far sooner than Microsoft] support Open XML files, and it will also support
some VBA in its spreadsheet module whereas Excel 2008 will not. Its also
ALREADY available as a native Intel version.

It is incredible that Microsoft keep boasting they have the biggest team of
Mac developers outside Apple and yet produce so very few products [the
number of which continues to shrink] and not even particularly good products
either.

Ultimately Microsoft's patently deliberate crippling of their Mac software
is I feel counter-productive. A Mac user will look at their obviously
crippled products (e.g. MS Messenger) and think - Microsoft obviously are
not very good at writing software its a good thing I am not using Windows as
that must be crap as well. A Windows user can look at iTunes on Windows and
see a full quality non crippled application that is far easier to use than
WMP and has more features than WMP. They can then think, blimey if that's
how good their free software is for Windows imagine how good the rest of
their software for their own operating system must be. Hence the
[increasing] number of switchers to the Mac.

I would also say that historically having a GOOD cross-platform offering has
been a major reason for several software products succeeding over others
which did not (e.g. Quicken vs. MS Money, Excel vs. Lotus 123). This is one
of the main reasons Office succeeded in the first place and quite possibly
why iTunes is succeeding now. This is a lesson Microsoft have clearly
forgotten and the result will likely be far fewer sales of Office 2008
upgrades than Microsoft presumably expect. I as an IT Manager certainly see
no justification so far for spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading
all our users.

 

[Phillip Jones]

Uh... say WHAT?

I suppose that means that you're stridently endorsing implementation of
ActiveX controls for MacOffice?

Whose responsibility is it to make sure that WinOffice apps respond
appropriately to AppleEvents?

What should MacOffice's VBA MacScript() command do in WinOffice?

How exactly should Mac OS Creator Codes be used for file I/O routines in
WinOffice apps?

And when the cost of implementing a WinOffice feature set on the Mac
amounts to more than the lifetime expected profit from all sales of
MacOffice, who gets hurt by the rational decision to discontinue
MacOffice?

I know you're mostly venting, Phillip, but really...

No I am not endorsing Active-X in fact I thing there should be criminal
penalties for use of Active-X as MS implements it. There is no way on
earth to make it safe. Its far more un-secure than Java or even Javascript.
Active-X is a derivation of OpenScript. And Open script as original
designed has far more controls to prevent running malicious code. Many
of those secure measures were thwarted by MS in creating Active-X.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[JE McGimpsey]

No I am not endorsing Active-X in fact I thing there should be criminal
penalties for use of Active-X as MS implements it. There is no way on
earth to make it safe. Its far more un-secure than Java or even Javascript.
Active-X is a derivation of OpenScript. And Open script as original
designed has far more controls to prevent running malicious code. Many
of those secure measures were thwarted by MS in creating Active-X.

Then how do you justify your statement that "all features on one
platform, any platform should be exactly the same on all platforms"?
ActiveX is a feature of WinOffice. By your logic, it should be exactly
the same on Macs.

Or are you arguing that only lowest-common-denominator features should
be implemented?

That way lies madness, and a guaranteed and unavoidable drive toward
eliminating ANY economic incentive for cross-platform development.

Which would leave us in much the situation we've been moving toward
since Office98, with applications that may have some (or many)
cross-functional capabilities and aesthetic similarities, but
fundamentally distinct code bases. We'd just call the apps Y and Z,
rather than WinY and MacY.

 

[Phillip Jones]

No All features of Mac/PC combined should be on both. The Only exception
Active-X should be on "no" platform period.

Then how do you justify your statement that "all features on one
platform, any platform should be exactly the same on all platforms"?
ActiveX is a feature of WinOffice. By your logic, it should be exactly
the same on Macs.

Or are you arguing that only lowest-common-denominator features should
be implemented?

That way lies madness, and a guaranteed and unavoidable drive toward
eliminating ANY economic incentive for cross-platform development.

Which would leave us in much the situation we've been moving toward
since Office98, with applications that may have some (or many)
cross-functional capabilities and aesthetic similarities, but
fundamentally distinct code bases. We'd just call the apps Y and Z,
rather than WinY and MacY.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[JE McGimpsey]

No All features of Mac/PC combined should be on both. The Only exception
Active-X should be on "no" platform period.

The ONLY exception? So MacOffice should have gotten Task Pains?

MacOffice should get the Ribbon interface, even though a
feature-equivalent implementation would violate the Mac HIG (Human
Interface Guidelines)? WHy bother having a Mac?

So again, what would you expect a WinOffice implementation of
MacScript() to *do*?

How about IRM (information rights management) that can *only* be
implemented via Windows Server. Do you deliberately cripple WinOffice
enterprise users because MacOS doesn't support that feature?

What about other tightly integrated WinOffice apps, say Access, or Visio
or FrontPage? Do you force Microsoft to spend more than they'll ever
possibly recover in MacOffice sales to create feature-equivalent apps?
If not, how will your "all features" handle the situation? How would you
enforce your equivalency?

What about single-platform acquisitions, like Groove? MS didn't develop
it, do they have to wait to deploy it until they can create a
feature-equivalent Mac version?

How do you deal with the fact that MS has control over Windows OS and
its support for and integration with WinOffice, but has NO control (and
often no information!) about developments in MacOS???

How should MS force Apple to integrate the .NET framework in MacOS?

It's fine to pontificate about equivalency, but MS is a *business*, not
a public service entity. Demanding equivalence is tantamount demanding a
monopoly (and of course it will be a Windows monopoly, not Mac), because
it makes ZERO sense (and could be fairly construed to be *illegal*,
immoral and unethical) for MS management to deliberately dissipate its
shareholders' wealth by subsidizing Mac users. Their *only* rational
decision would be to close down support for Macs.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Phillip,

Just posting another posting to let others know that ActiveX is an Open
Source project. No need to re-hash this, as you, me and others covered this
ground Mon, Jul 12 2004:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.excel/browse_thre
ad/thread/c53f29864cb1d8ea/13f12efb4d53846e?lnk=st&q=Activex+Open+Source&rnu
m=3#13f12efb4d53846e

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

No I am not endorsing Active-X in fact I thing there should be criminal
penalties for use of Active-X as MS implements it. There is no way on
earth to make it safe. Its far more un-secure than Java or even Javascript.
Active-X is a derivation of OpenScript. And Open script as original
designed has far more controls to prevent running malicious code. Many
of those secure measures were thwarted by MS in creating Active-X.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi John:

However Microsoft keep boasting they are the biggest Mac developer team
outside Apple

Well, that much is correct

and yet they cannot (apparently) manage to do what much MUCH
smaller teams have.

Of course they *could* manage it. How much extra profit would they make if
they *did*? It will surprise many, I am sure, to hear than Microsoft is a
*business*. With a board of directors that gets to go to jail if they do
not act, at all times, to maximise the profit to their shareholders. For
charity work, write to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...

As I pointed out NeoOffice already can do r-t-l on a Mac
and will soon do Open XML and even VBA all Intel native on a Mac.

Sure. OK. Now let's see it match the Microsoft Office feature set. Sorry:
you have to compare Apples with Apples. Let's wait to see what NeoOffice
actually "delivers" in terms of Open XML and VBA. If NeoOffice does all
that you need, then the decision is obvious. Conversely, if you order a
million licences for Microsoft Office, then I am sure Microsoft would
consider your feature requests very carefully.

By the way, I believe Nisus Writer Express at least purely uses the built-in
Tiger routines since it says that (to do it) it requires Tiger.

It seems like it might, doesn't it! I would "expect" an application on any
platform to call the platform utilities instead of rolling their own.

Even none r-t-l languages like Russian (Cyrillic), Welsh, and Greek don't
really work in Word 2004 because it still does not do Unicode.

That's not right, and you know it Or, if you like, give me a specific
example... Puh-Leeeze don't let's get into a round of "I can't get such and
such a character" only to discover that you don't own a font that contains
it

Apple's free TextEdit (the Mac equivalent of Windows WordPad) does a better
job with such Word files!

Again, if TextEdit does all you need, then you've saved yourself a lot of
money. Sadly, TextEdit is a little limited for my needs.

There maybe a cost to Microsoft for adding rtl support but as they are
having to clean up the code anyway I don't believe it would have been as big
as you think.

I know you don't *believe* it, but I also know I'm right on this one. We
"could" safely say that if Microsoft Office had an architectural design more
appropriate to the modern computing environment, then it would be a much
easier change. But it doesn't. Much of Word's code base is 30 years old.
Many of the design decisions that were perfectly appropriate then (8 bits,
low memory usage, low disk I/O, no multi-tasking, single-threaded) are
hurting us now. Office was designed for a very much smaller machine than it
now finds itself on, and some of it was designed and rushed to market long
before good software design practices had even been discovered.

IF they had made the decision to kill two birds with one stone.

Their design decisions are made exactly the same way any other large
commercial software maker does it: They compute a budget, consistent with
profitable operation, given the projected sales attainable by Mac Office.
They then take a list of everything everyone wants, including RTL and VBA,
and remove items from that list in reverse order of popularity until the
cost fits within the budget.

We do not yet know whether RTL made the cut. We do know that VBA did not.

It is also the case that Office 2008 currently offers practically nothing to
entice people to upgrade.

I disagree strongly. It offers a Universal binary and the new file format.
This is like the change from Word 95 to Word 97 on the PC. It offered
practically NO new "features", but it offered 32-bit processing, the
Word.Document.8 32-bit file format that was far more robust than its
predecessor, and the ability to use rich file systems such as HFS+ and NTFS.

The end user would barely have noticed: but the Information Systems
Departments around the world jumped in with both feet because of the
stability and inherent lower total cost of ownership.

Office 2007/2008 will be the same. We have a new user interface that
performs far better than the old for unskilled users. The less you already
know about how to create Office documents, the better it performs. In a
corporate setting, the new UI is the answer to an IS director's prayer.

But the reason the corporates will go for this thing whether it has a new UI
or not is the new open, robust, compact file format. This file system
HALVES the amount of storage a corporation needs!! It HALVES the support
desk calls. Trust me, they WILL want it

For the home Mac user, the Universal Binary will be the reason they want it.
At last they will get some PERFORMANCE out of their Mac-Intels. Wait 'till
you see this thing operating on a laptop. It jumps and sparkles on
challenging documents where the old one plods and grinds.

We already know we are going to loose VBA support (which even though we are
a 100% Mac site we use in both Word and Excel internally, and we also need
to be exchange files with PC users). Intel nativeness is nice to have but
Office 2004 works fine (with VBA as well) in Rosetta.

Oh yeah, tell me about it. My main expertise is in Macros I would take
issue with your assertion that those "work fine" however. I have a macro
here that runs 13 seconds on a PC and 13 MINUTES on a Mac

The ONLY reason left from my perspective for upgrading (since we are loosing
VBA, and apparently not getting better language support)

Who SAID we were "not getting better language support"?? Who SAID it?
Where's your evidence? All we have so far is speculation: mine, yours, and
others. We WILL be getting "better language support". Whether that
includes RTL support or not, is the question. The extent of MY speculation
is that RTL support MIGHT get dropped for THIS RELEASE, given that it was
not sufficiently available in the operating system when design work began
more than two years ago.

But I have no idea whether it HAS been dropped for this release. Those who
do know are not allowed to tell us; those who tell us, don't know!

Microsoft got badly burned by Apple's last-minute changes to the operating
system last time around. In future, they will be far less likely to trust
Apple to deliver on its feature set. Software vendors world-wide are now
much more likely to wait and see what Apple actually puts in the box before
beginning expensive design work or committing limited funding to the
utilisation of features that sad experience tells them may not get
delivered, or may not work as advertised.

Microsoft had taken the opportunity of having to substantially re-write
Office to move to Xcode and as a result FINALLY killed off the
hundreds/THOUSANDS of ancient bugs we still suffer from

That's two statements I can see you've never worked in large-scale
commercial software development. I have, for the past 30 years.

1) To "substantially re-write" Microsoft Office would involve perhaps
27,000 person-years of effort, at a cost of $5,400,000,000 -- it would raise
the price of a copy of Mac Office by $10,800 to $11,199.95 per copy.

Even if my figures are 50 per cent too high (and I'm pretty sure they're
not...) it still might not happen

2) If you "port" software from one platform or development environment to
another, the most important thing you do is MAKE NO CHANGES AT ALL. If you
try to change the software while you're converting it, the project is almost
guaranteed to fail. The difficulties, problems, administration, and testing
grow exponentially. No: You convert it first, ensure that all the old bugs
and foibles are faithfully replicated, THEN you set about to modify it.

In
particular Office 2004 still has major problems with Apple servers.

It does? What are they?

I really cannot see any justification for spending tens of thousands of
dollars (or UK equivalent) upgrading our company to Office 2008 for such a
mediocre upgrade.

You must evaluate the delivered product against YOUR feature requirements.
This is where everyone gets to do their own homework , and everyone will get
a slightly different answer. You won't be upgrading? That's OK... We're
going to be quite busy in here with PC Switchers for the next couple of
years -- see you next time, and we'll see what your decision is then

Cheers

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John Lockwood]

That's not right, and you know it Or, if you like, give me a specific
example... Puh-Leeeze don't let's get into a round of "I can't get such and
such a character" only to discover that you don't own a font that contains
it

A firm of [Mac using] lawyers specialising in immigration issues frequently
receives PC Word files containing Cyrillic text. Nearly always Word 2004
(for Mac) fails to display this properly whereas TextEdit has no problems
with the same document. I have also seen this message from a Welsh user
"Office on Mac simply doesn't support Unicode at all, as far as I can see.
Whilst that obviously affects R-L scripts, it also means Mac Office is
useless for many European and other roman-script languages. In my case
that's Welsh -- where 'W' and 'Y' are vowels, which often need to be
accented."

At some point there comes a stage when patching old crud becomes untenable
and it is time to do a complete (or major) re-write. This is because the
quality goes down, and costs of even small changes goes up. Because
Microsoft continue to refuse to do a major rewrite we are as I said stuck
with DECADES old bugs.

Doing a major rewrite allows new facilities to be added, bugs to be
eliminated (yes new ones will of course be created), and also COST SAVINGS
on future support and upgrades. Much of this could be shared between the
Windows and Mac platforms. For example apparently VBA for Office for Windows
64bit is apparently also going to be a problem, a rewrite here could benefit
both platforms (if for a change Microsoft THINK first).

Looking at Mac history, if Microsoft had bitten the bullet back when OS X
was launched (i.e. we are talking about Office v.X) and done a more
substantial rewrite to proper OS X goodness (instead of a bare minimum
approach), they would not have had as much pain now AND IT WOULD NOT HAVE
COST AS MUCH TO PORT TO OS X ON INTEL. I am not saying Microsoft in that
case were wrong (it allowed them to get v.X out quicker and cheaper), but
some pain earlier would have saved a lot of pain later.

Microsoft understood this lesson for Windows (Vista is a major rewrite
whereas previous versions merely patched old crud), they should therefore
adopt it for Office as well.

Microsoft seem far too fond of the quick and [very] dirty fix.

Adobe, produce far more Mac software than Microsoft, with a smaller Mac team
and their Mac software is of far higher quality than the ghastly stuff from
Microsoft. Adobe has exactly the same business and technical issues to
consider as Microsoft so it can be done.

I disagree strongly. It offers a Universal binary and the new file format.
This is like the change from Word 95 to Word 97 on the PC. It offered
practically NO new "features", but it offered 32-bit processing, the
Word.Document.8 32-bit file format that was far more robust than its
predecessor, and the ability to use rich file systems such as HFS+ and NTFS.

For the home Mac user, the Universal Binary will be the reason they want it.
At last they will get some PERFORMANCE out of their Mac-Intels. Wait 'till
you see this thing operating on a laptop. It jumps and sparkles on
challenging documents where the old one plods and grinds.

The new file format will be available to users of Office 2004 as well FREE
OF CHARGE so users are NOT forced to move to Office 2008 for this (and pay
vast sums of money).

Office unlike Photoshop is not as speed sensitive an application. Yes more
speed is always nice but in the case of Office it is not as critical.

2004 still has major problems with Apple servers.

It does? What are they?

Examples - due to the way Word handles autosaving recovery files and not
closing previous ones properly you can end up with 'too many files open'.
Another even more annoying one is that Word AND Excel when storing files on
a Mac OS X 10.4 server do not (from a Mac point of view) do file locking
properly resulting in all sorts of problems, e.g. Saying a file is busy when
it is not, and vice versa (there is some case for saying this might be
Apple's fault but only Word/Excel show the problem, we do not have these
problems with other software e.g. Adobe).

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

Microsoft understood this lesson for Windows (Vista is a major rewrite
whereas previous versions merely patched old crud), they should therefore
adopt it for Office as well.

Oh, come on now - be sensible.

Microsoft has had a team of THOUSANDS of people working on Vista - and it's
taken them how many years to develop it?

There are MILLIONS of man-hours invested in Vista - about 90 million,
according to Business Week. Estimated total development cost is around $10
BILLION.

They can justify that because they expect to spread that development cost
over hundreds of millions of units (current PC sales worldwide are around
200 million units per annum), so the development cost _per license_ comes to
something under $100.

Now, how can you equate that sort of exercise with Office for Mac? Just how
many licenses of 'Office 2013' (it took 5 years to re-write windows) would
you have to sell to recover your money?

If it was your business, would you spend that money?

 

[Phillip Jones]

Oh, come on now - be sensible.

Microsoft has had a team of THOUSANDS of people working on Vista - and it's
taken them how many years to develop it?

There are MILLIONS of man-hours invested in Vista - about 90 million,
according to Business Week. Estimated total development cost is around $10
BILLION.

They can justify that because they expect to spread that development cost
over hundreds of millions of units (current PC sales worldwide are around
200 million units per annum), so the development cost _per license_ comes to
something under $100.

Now, how can you equate that sort of exercise with Office for Mac? Just how
many licenses of 'Office 2013' (it took 5 years to re-write windows) would
you have to sell to recover your money?

If it was your business, would you spend that money?

That's the problem we the Mac Community will always have to put up with
second third rate software. What choice do we have everyone says we have
choices. Yes on PC PC's have probably 10 to 20 different Major Word pros
. On the Mac we have one and two or three wannabe's. The last other
Major Word processor for Mac was Word Perfect Mac (many lawyers, and
Judges still use it). (A lawyer John Rethorst, has just completed a
Sheepsaver/WPMac Port to Intel Mac.) But Corel was bullied in to killing
it off.

So because our decision to use a system isn't subject to ten billion
bugs a day, spyware/Adware/malware. That when a problem arises you don't
have to run down some weird .ini file with a title 60 characters long,
that in the wrong place. Or has a space in the wrong place in the name,
corrupt, missing or over written by a bug. We have to suffer second rate
software.

Enough on this subject. Its a waste of time, voicing an opinion. We Mac
users just have to deal with it suck it up.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
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