Monday, November 15, 2010

MS Office 2011 Language Support

The Help for Office 2011 for Mac provides the following list of supported input keyboards and methods:

"Australian, Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dvorak, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian (F.Y.R.O.), Northern Sami, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss French, Swiss German, Turkish, U.S., Ukrainian, Unicode Hex Input, and Welsh. You can also use the following Mac OS X input methods: Hangul, Kotoeri, Murasu Anjal Tamil, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese."

A list of languages for which proofing tools are available is here.

I am skeptical that Murasu Anjal Tamil will actually work and am seeking confirmation. MS claimed that for Office 2008 as well, and it turned out to be incorrect.

PS For a great analysis by Michael Kaplan of Mac Office 2011 support for Tamil, see this article.

9 comments:

Jean Robert said...

I just tried Word 2011 for Mac at an Apple Premium Reseller and can confirm that Devanagari is still not supported. I am giving up on Office.

Bob said...

I'm late to this blog post. I decided to entertain the idea of buying Office 2011. I'm doing my MBA in the Middle East. My colleagues, of course, all use Office on PCs. While all the coursework is in English, there are research project we do which includes Arabic. While NeoOffice works for me, it is a little querky with docs I get from classmates. So I thought I should get Office 2011. But once again, MS let's me down. I just can't understand why Arabic is not supported?!

Tom Gewecke said...

Some people think the reasons are technical and the necessary investment in programming to add this support. Others speculate that marketing also plays a role -- i.e. that without Arabic and Indic scripts, a billion or so people can't use OS X and still be compatible with MS Office.

Muthu said...

Word in Office 2011 needs an OpenType font for Indic support. If you copy over any Tamil/Devanagari font from Windows, that appears to work. However, i found one minor glitch with the support for input methods (like Anjal Tamil). Keyboards (like Devanagari) appear to work fine.

The strange thing is, PPT, Excel and Outlook seem to favor AAT - which is Apple's native layout engine.

Took me a while to piece all of these together.

Tom Gewecke said...

Muthu -- That is a major breakthrough if correct. Could you please send me a screen shot of the Devanagari word "hindi" typed in Mac Word 2011 (the keystrokes in Devanagari Qwerty are h - i - n -f - d- shift + i) showing the name of the font used? tom at bluesky dot org.

கலைமணி said...

Hi Tom
I had just developed a keyboard for MAC OS, based on the old Typewriter layout, with which I am familiar with.
I tested my keyboard and some of the Tamil Unicode fonts.
I can type in Tamil BUT only in Word 2011. The fonts do not work in other Office 2011 progs. like PPT,Outlook etc.
I have some screenshots. How can I send them to you?

Tom Gewecke said...

You can email me at tom at bluesky dot org

Farzin said...

Muthu, Tom. a me too here.. did you get it working? will it work with Persian/Arabic characters as well?

Tom Gewecke said...

Farzin -- No, it will not work for Arabic script to just add a different kind of font.