I live in Israel. When I tell friends about Macs and how good they are, the first question they ask is: “Can I use MS Office on a mac” And sadly, I have to say, Nope, you can’t.
Microsoft Word for mac does not support right-to-left writing, so it can’t be used for writing in hebrew.
Yes, I know there’s NeoOffice, but the whole user experience is not quite mac-like yet, and it takes ages to load. Of course there’s Mellel which is quite great, but unfortunately, the standard format is MS Office. Myself, If i need to type in hebrew, I just use TextEdit. OS X has RTL support built in very nicely.
I was hoping that the release of Office 2008 would solve this problem, and I’d finally be able to write something positive about Microsoft. But no, Satan Bill’s gang from Redmond had to do it wrong again.
Let’s hope that by the time Microsoft releases Office 2012, The standard document format will be the Open Document Format will be standard, and there will be plenty of good Word Processors that use the open doc format.
I also live in Israel and recently upgraded to a brand new macbook. I enjoy pages and based on several presentations I made with keynote, I think it’s better then powerpoint.
The the iWork package supports poorly in Hebrew and as it already been said, Office 2008 isn’t the answer, which makes me run Parallels with Windows XP and Office 2007 for hebrew documents, presentations and so on.
IT’S A SHAME!