Apple update for RTL support in Microsoft office for Mac?

Question

Apple update for RTL support in Microsoft office for Mac?

I bought Office 365 for Mac 2016 and need it to work in Hebrew. Apparently this version (or any other, for that matter) doesn't support RTL languages but the salesmen of Microsoft Israel assured me there was a patch/update issued by Apple that's supposed to make Office 365 support RTL.

Has anyone heard of anything like that? It it's not an urban legend, can you please enclose a link to this update?

Best!

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 20, 2015 5:33 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Oct 20, 2015 9:40 AM in response to Grownup Daria

Grownup Daria wrote:

the salesmen of Microsoft Israel assured me there was a patch/update issued by Apple that's supposed to make Office 365 support RTL.

That's really crazy. No such thing.

There is however a workaround that meets some people's needs: If you create a rtl doc on word for windows, word for ios, or word online and import it into your Mac as a template, this can sometimes do rlt correctly. Word 2016 should be better than Word 2011.

Otherwise you need to use another app: TextEdit, Pages, Mellel, Nisus, LibraOffice should all work just fine.

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Answer 2

Oct 20, 2015 9:41 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

I've heard about this workaround. I don't think this is what I paid for and I refuse to use it.

Thanks a lot!

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Answer 3

JimmyCMPIT

Level 7

29,223 points

Oct 20, 2015 1:57 PM in response to Grownup Daria

MS Has a patch out for 2016, but not for issues with El Capitan, additionally they stated they were working with Apple to fix some of the problems reported overall with 2016. Cross your fingers, that's about it.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Update-on-Office-2016-for-Mac-El-Capita n-4dc92cb5-57d1-43d3-aec7-6076b0da547f

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Answer 4

Oct 20, 2015 1:58 PM in response to JimmyCMPIT

Yeh, that's not it either. I think this update was downloaded automatically and had no effect on RTL. Thanks.

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Answer 5

Oct 21, 2015 4:05 AM in response to Grownup Daria

Apple's OS X operating system has supported RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic for years and years.

Microsoft Word in Microsoft Office for Mac still does not support RTL languages properly and this still applies to both Office365 and Office 2016 for Mac. This is a Microsoft issue not an Apple issue. In fact at one point in the past the Israeli government even imposed a ban on Microsoft products over this issues.

See

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/06/17/microsofts_mac_hebrew_snub_prompts/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/02/mac_users_to_ms_your/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/14/israel_slams_the_door/

At one point Microsoft used the excuse that Word uses their own i.e. Microsoft's code for 'rendering' the text on screen rather than the operating system code so as to ensure that the Mac and Windows display of a page looks as similar as possible. As Microsoft had not ported an up-to-date version of the Windows code which can do RTL to the Mac the Mac version of Word could not and still cannot do RTL.

This excuse is of course worthless. It's their code and they are the world's biggest software company and if they cannot manage this they should not be in business. Clearly there has been and still is significant demand for this feature and it even managed to upset a government i.e. Israel let alone mere users. I don't understand why the Isreali government let Microsoft off the hook after that temporary ban in 2003 since over a decade later Microsoft still have not fixed this issue.

The general Mac opinion is that this is yet another aspect of Microsoft deliberately crippling their Mac products. Outlook for Mac is a prime example.

To summarise the Microsoft rep is talking rubbish this is all Microsoft's fault and they clearly do not give a **** about fixing it.

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Answer 6

Oct 21, 2015 5:15 AM in response to John Lockwood

I'll add to this by telling that in the early 2000 the Israeli Government actually paid for localizing Open Office (which was at least in the Hebrew version quite in poor state). The logic behind it was financial - since the Hebrew market is a small one, all government computers had to run MS Office and they paid MILLIONS for the licenses. I think they funded the project for 2-3 years and then dropped it, only making MS stronger.

The funny thing is that I posted it because it was an official MS rep who "told" me about this alleged patch. It took them almost a week to admit that there's no RTL support and when they finally did and referred me to the non-existent patch, I told him that I purchased a product from MS, and if their product is incomplete and someone else did the cleaning up after them, then it's MS's responsibility to refer me to where I can find the third party patch. Not only did he refuse, but he also threatened me that if I cancel my Office 365 student subscription - I won't be eligible to purchase a new one if and when they release an RTL solution FOR THE NEXT 4 YEARS! They're actually considering of forcing me to hold on to a useless license!

By the way, the iOS version of Word in Hebrew works just fine. Which means that when they want to - they can. Only they don't.

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Oct 21, 2015 8:52 AM in response to Grownup Daria

MS Word for Mac has been "incomplete" for about 1 billion+ people for the last 14 years. In its Help there used to be a list of the supported keyboards. The ones supported by normal OS X apps but not on the MS Word list were arabic, azeri, armenian, bangla, cherokee, dari, devanagari, guarati, gurmukhi, hawaiian, hebrew, jawi, kannada, kazakh, khmer, kurdish, malayalam, myanmar, nepali, oriya, pashto, persian, sinhala, telugu, thai, tibetan, uighur, urdu, uzbek.

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