Morrissey? I know How Soon Now Is -- it's as soon as I can get the latest Mac Office installed!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/12/02 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/12/02/10099342.aspx

Do you still have a MacBook? As you probably know, Office for Mac is notorious for its inability to do RTL, Indic, and numerous other scripts which Office for Windows and all other Mac apps can handle. But I think that the new Office 2011 may be able to do Tamil, which I know is a favorite of yours. It is listed in the keyboard support Help and I think the InaMaithai font is recognized. I'm not able to test this myself, as there is no free trial and I don't use Office, but you might want to see if it really does correct Tamil. That would be something of a breakthrough.

Office 2008 claimed to do Tamil when it came out, but as far as I know that was incorrect, it could never recognize the right font and generated boxes or other garbage.

Indeed, my non-Unibody but still beloved MacBook Pro is still around and remains my second-favorite machine!

I have been hearing both some exciting and some annoying bits of information about it, and am eagerly hoping to get it installed and take a look as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, there are some real challenges figuring out how to get a copy installed when you work for Microsoft but aren't on the team doing all the Apple work like Mac Office.

But I will get it installed soon, and will blog about my thoughts about things; from some of those early reports it looks like many things have been made better and without significant regressions the "bad news" seems mostly limited to stuff they didn't get to yet). So I am pretty excited to see how things look. :-)

Of course there may be some snark points in the space between those two extremes as well but I doubt that will be much of an inflection point that would impact me; that would mostly be as problem for other people. :-)

Anyhow, I went to look at some DLs and see who I knew over there, but I only recognized one person. And I don't think Dave has a ton of time to do my product support for his product.

If anyone reading this blog is from within Microsoft and works on Mac Office and knows how I can get a copy to install on my Mac Book Pro, please feel free to reach out to me. I know this shouldn't be as hard as it has turned out to be (an wasn't when I installed the previous version!)....

Here is a bit of history: Office 98 and older did not support WorldScript at all. Office 2001 added support for WorldScript, including both support for CJK and RTL languages. Apple unfortunately decided that RTL/complex script languages should be supported via Unicode only in Mac OS X, and Office v.X, the first Carbon version, was still based on WorldScript. Office 2004 finally ported it to Unicode, supporting CJK well but RTL still not as well.

I guess you have access to MSDN?

Office 2011 for Mac (Home and Business) is now on MSDN.

Don't know for sure if it is available for all MSDN levels, but you can give it a try.

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