Arabic Script (for Ms Word 2008 For Mac

 

More and more of our clients are now using Apple computers. And while I love my new, there are some pretty significant barriers to working with Arabic text on a Mac.

The issue is not that Apple doesn’t support Arabic language (it does). The problem is that Microsoft Office for Mac is not built to work with right-to-left languages like Arabic, Farsi, and so on. And since most workplaces use Office as the standard software package, it is difficult (but not totally impossible) to use Office for Mac as an Arabic language word processor.

First off, let’s stop for a minute and reflect on how outrageous it is that Microsoft has not included this critical function in Office for Mac, the standard “work” software used around the world. If you’re like me, you can join this calling on Microsoft to offer Arabic support in future versions of Office for Mac. Using Arabic on Mac is more difficult than on a Windows PC but it’s not impossible.

Arabic Script (for Ms Word 2008 For Mac

So we’ve put together this quick guide for getting the most out of your Mac within an Arabic environment. Enabling Arabic Language Support on the Mac Step one is to turn on Arabic language support within Apple’s OS X operating system. To do this, click the Apple logo at the top left of your screen and select “System Preferences.” Click “Language & Region,” then click the plus arrow and select Arabic. Select whether you want to have Arabic be the primary language (which will Arabize your full operating system) or as a secondary language for use in certain applications. Under”Keyboard Preferences” you will be able to select from a variety of keyboard layouts (including a helpful QWERTY version if you are unfamiliar with typing on a standard Arabic layout). Now you’re all set. When you go to the upper right corner of your screen you should see a little flag icon (in my case U.S.

Word

For American English). Click that icon and you will see a drop down menu for you to select Arabic (or whatever other input languages you need). Use this menu to toggle between input languages when you’re inside an application. If you are going to be doing extensive Arabic word processing and your computer doesn’t have an Arabic-style keyboard, you will want to consider buying some, so you can see which key goes with which letter and type quickly. If you just need to do minor edits or write the occasional email, you can use the text-input function at or the QWERTY keyboard layout which is fairly intuitive.

Arabic Script (for Ms Word 2008 For Mac Free

Another option for inputting text is the on-screen keyboard to click letters with your mouse; just select the “Open Keyboard Preferences” option in the image above and hunt and peck away. Using Microsoft Word for Mac To View Existing Documents If you are trying to work with an Arabic language Word doc that someone has sent you, one of two things are going to happen when you open the file on your Mac:. The file will work totally normally in Arabic (about 40% of the time). The file will contain weird formatting glitches, e.g. Some text will appear as little boxes, or letters will be disconnected from each other (about 60% of the time) If the document looks okay, you’ve hit the jackpot and can take your colleagues out for a celebratory Starbucks.

If not, it’s time for Plan B. Plan B: The Google Drive Workaround If your document doesn’t open correctly in Word, the only way you will be able to see it is with a little trick using Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs). Here’s how it works:. If you don’t already have a Google account, create one. Open your Google Drive page by going to. Click the upload button, select “files” and then find and select the Arabic “.docx” file you want to work with.

2008

The file will upload to Google, and you should be able to see your file in the list. Click the file to open and view. If you need to actually edit the file you are working with, just select the file from your Google Drive file list and click “Export to Google Docs.” This will create an editable version of the file that you can work with using the Google Docs editor. When you are finished editing your file, you can download a version of it to share with your colleagues, in MS Word, PDF, or RTF formats. A caveat: this system can go awry when you are dealing with heavily formatted documents, and large files that are slow to upload and process in Drive. But this trick is workable for emails, short articles, and other routine jobs. If you are still running into issues with Google Drive, there are a few more options you can try: Plan C: Open Source Office Clones The Google work-around is best for smallish files with light formatting.

But what if you have a spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentation or Word file with more involved formatting? In this case, your best bet may be to install one of the handful of Office clones that are out there for Mac, many of which have much better Arabic support than Microsoft. Our top recommendation for this is the NeoOffice suite. Is a branch of the Open Office project and, while it’s not completely free, we’ve found it has the best support for Arabic which is well worth the $10-30 you will pay for a copy. It contains full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software that is able to work with MS Office file formats.

For a wide range of basic documents, this is an ideal choice. The Office clones can get problematic, however, if you are working with heavily formatted documents or doing back-and-forth revisions with someone using MS Office. Plan D: Install Windows on your Mac (AKA The Nuclear Option) After much frustration with options A thru C, I finally decided it was time to do the unthinkable: install Windows and Office for Windows on my Mac. When you are working professionally on Office documents in Arabic that require a good deal of formatting, or multiple rounds of revisions etc the only foolproof way to avoid glitches is to run the standard Office for Windows, which fully supports Arabic. The only way to do this is to first install the Windows operating system on your Mac. There are two main plans of attack for getting Windows running on your Mac:. Option 1: Boot Camp: is part of Mac OS X and allows you to install Windows on a separate hard drive partition.

The advantages of using Boot Camp are that it is free (although you still need to buy a copy of and ) and that the full resources of your computer are dedicated to Windows when it is running, meaning faster performance. The disadvantage is that switching between Windows and OSX requires a reboot, which makes it cumbersome to go back-and-forth between Windows and Mac applications. Option 2: Virtual Machines: Virtualization programs like and allow you to run Windows just as you would any other app within OS X. Windows runs inside a dedicated window, allowing you to switch back and forth without rebooting and share files easily between the two environments.

Aside from cost (around $60-90), the only downside to these “virtual machines” is that you will see a drop in performance because your computer’s resources are being split between the two operating systems. The slower performance is not a huge issue if you are limiting yourself to MS Office apps, but will become a bigger problem if you need to run more graphically intensive software. Conclusion It remains frustrating that Mac users are forced to resort to these clunky workarounds to work professionally in the world’s fifth most spoken language. So maybe it’s time to revisit that to get Microsoft to support Arabic language in Office for Mac Thanks for reading!

If you’d like Industry Arabic to get rid of your and word processing headaches for good, just contact us by pressing the button below to discuss a project.

It has been 24 years since Microsoft first released Word, and four years since the program’s last major upgrade. How much more can Microsoft do to tweak its venerable word processor? Surprisingly, Word gets several major enhancements in Office 2008, the first version of Microsoft’s productivity suite to run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.

Those changes include a new document format, a simplified toolbar, and a new toolbox that combines palettes for managing formatting, clip art, iPhoto images, research, and bibliographies. But the biggest improvement is the addition of a new view option called Publishing Layout. In this new view, arranging text and graphics on the page is far simpler than it was in previous versions of Word. Like Apple, Microsoft has apparently concluded that people use word processing programs for far more than just creating text-based documents. Creating complex, graphics-rich documents requires tools historically found in powerful page layout programs such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. Like, Microsoft Word now allows you to select a distinct editing environment specifically for creating layout-intensive documents.

That environment is Publishing Layout. The biggest downside in what would otherwise be an excellent upgrade: the elimination of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). In its place, Word 2008 offers limited support for AppleScript and Automator. Those replacements don’t offer the recording or other features that made it pretty simple to automate and customize Word 2004. If you’re accustomed to Word 2004’s automation features, you’re going to be disappointed in Word 2008.

Preferences Pane: Word’s new preferences pane is more Mac-like and better organizes Word’s many preference options, making it much easier to customize the program. Fresh look Like the other Office 2008 apps, Word has a new user interface that makes it easier to manage preferences, consolidates most of Word’s formatting tools, and puts key document elements—including cover pages, headers, footers, and bibliographies—a single click away. The first and most obvious interface change is the new toolbar.

It sits at the top of your document window, rather than being tied to the menu bar. In previous versions, Word’s toolbars could fill up most of the top of your screen. They were too easy to accidentally rearrange and contained way more buttons than most people used. Word 2008’s simpler toolbar includes all of what you need to effectively open, create, and save documents, undo and redo changes, and add tables and columns. If there’s a button you don’t want or one that you think is missing, it’s easy to change the toolbar. Unfortunately, Word still doesn’t use the typical Mac toolbar customization sheet; Microsoft says those sheets couldn’t manage all the options Microsoft wanted to offer.

Just below Word’s toolbar is the Elements Gallery, a set of five new buttons from which you can quickly add document elements, tables, charts, SmartArt graphics, and WordArt to documents. The Document Elements button, for example, lets you quickly add or modify cover pages, headers and footers, or a table of contents. Some users may find it annoying that they can’t remove this Gallery; I think more will be grateful for its presence. Elements Gallery: You can’t get rid of the toolbar that now appears at the top of every document, but it does give you quick access to all kinds of graphics and other document options. Word 2008’s new Toolbox combines a bunch of different palettes in one floating tool. From it, you can quickly access formatting options, insertable symbols, clip art, your iPhoto library, reference tools, and Office’s Scrapbook and Project Center. In previous versions, those tools were scattered among menus, toolbars, and floating palettes; they’re now all in one place.

Aside from the formatting tools, I particularly liked the Toolbox’s Citations panel, which allows you to quickly and simply create a database of reference works. By adding articles, Web sites, books, and other materials to this database, you can easily add them to your document. Word will then automatically create a bibliography or citation page (in APA, Chicago, MLA, or Turabian format).

Previous editions of Word had limited versions of this feature, but it was not this obvious or easy to use. Still, the Toolbox lacks the simplicity of Pages’ floating palettes. For example, depending on what was selected in my document and which disclosure triangles were opened, the Formatting palette sometimes outgrew my screen—even when I was working on a 20-inch iMac. Closing those disclosure triangles took care of this problem, but it would be nice if Word worked more like Pages, which uses a tabbed format for document options and which allows you to open more than one floating palette at a time. I was also frustrated by the fact that my scroll wheel didn’t work on scrollbars in the formatting palette but did work on other scrollbars in the Toolbox. One other nice interface change: Word 2008’s new Preferences panel is much better organized and more Mac-like than Word 2004’s. Publishing tools Publishing Layout: Word’s new Publishing Layout view gives you greater control over how text and images appear in your documents.

It’s always been a bit frustrating using Word to create brochures, postcards, posters, or other types of documents that require arranging different elements on the page. Previous versions simply haven’t been designed to perform that kind of page layout magic. Word 2008’s new Publishing Layout view changes that dramatically. Publishing Layout offers a bunch of tools for placing and manipulating text and graphics on the page. Like Pages, Word 2008 allows you to create template documents with image and text placeholders; you can drag and drop images and text into those placeholders, making it easy to turn those templates into new, fresh documents. You can also link text boxes so text overflows from one to another. The image-editing tools in Publishing Layout aren’t as good as those in Pages.

While it is possible to add masks and transparency and make minor adjustments to images in your document, the program is nowhere near as adept at it as Pages. Another thing I noticed: the longer I worked in Publishing Layout mode, the slower Word seemed to get when manipulating images or moving text boxes around on the page.

Bye-bye, VBA Word 2008 adopts the new, XML-based.docx format for documents. That format makes Word 2008 compatible with the latest version of Word for Windows.

Arabic Script (for Ms Word 2008 For Mac

Unfortunately, those documents can’t be opened in older versions of Word without the downloadable.docx converter from Microsoft. To bypass this problem, Word 2008 does allow you to save documents in the older.doc format using a Compatibility Mode. More significantly, Office 2008 marks the demise of Visual Basic for Applications. In its stead, Word includes an AppleScript library. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, Word’s AppleScript library isn’t nearly as complete as the VBA library was.

Arabic Script (for Ms Word 2008 For Mac Free Download

In addition, while there are 30 Automator actions for Word, they aren’t that useful. Neither AppleScript nor Automator will let you record a string of events in Word and save them as a reusable script. Word does a good job of merging data from a variety of sources, including text files, Office’s own address book, and FileMaker Pro. But, unlike Pages, Word can’t merge data from Apple’s Address Book app. I’d prefer a program that can merge data from any source.

But, given the choice, I’d take Word’s missing Address Book merge to Pages’ missing everything else. Industry network newsletter august 14, 2014 on flowvella. Should I stay? The question for most Mac users isn’t “Should I buy Word 2008?” It’s “Should I upgrade?” As a word processor, Word 2008 is no better or worse than Word 2004. You’ll be able to create and format documents the way you want to, print them, and get them out the door. But the new user interface is cleaner; thanks to some great design decisions at Microsoft, there’s virtually no learning curve.

Yes, it’s a pain that you can’t hide the Elements Gallery, but it never got in my way and it definitely put some previously hard-to-find features at my fingertips. Word’s enhanced publishing tools are a huge plus; Windows users have had Publisher for eons and the addition of Publishing Layout levels the playing field for Mac users. That said, you can get better page layout tools for less money (without losing Office file compatibility) from iWork’s Pages. The loss of VBA is a travesty; if you’re using Word in a mixed business environment with both Macs and Windows machines and you rely on a lot of macros, it’s a deal breaker. The Automator scripts that come with Word 2008 are not particularly valuable as automation tools, and there’s no easy way to automate with AppleScript. If you need automation, Word 2008 is not for you. Macworld’s buying advice As a word processor, little has changed in Word 2008.

The elimination of VBA and weak support for AppleScript and Automator make the program far less versatile and valuable for users who really need automation. But the program’s streamlined interface and the addition of the new Publishing Layout view make it a compelling choice, especially if you want to stretch Word beyond its current capabilities.

Jeffery Battersby is a network manager who lives in upstate New York. You can read his blog at.