I run English OS 10.3 with English Version of Office X; Recently I received some documents in Chinese for Words and Excel, but I can’t see anything except lines. I have tried to copy and paste on Texedit but that’s not too great, and it doesn’t work for Excel. Is there a way I can see these documents without having to create a new profile in Chinese, instaling a chinese version of office etc…
Thanks for any help.
This is a thorn in my side. Office X does not support two-byte Asian text. There are hacks out there that can kind of register Word and Excel to do it, but it doesn’t really work. Microsoft has intentionally left this functionality out. It has been a great way to keep the Asian market from adopting Mac OS X. Can you imagine what might happen overnight if the Mac could truly support Chinese in MS Office? It would actualy be a viable alternative to Windows on the PC. As it is now, MS can control Apple’s penetration into Asia simply by truncating its support for Chinese Office productivity.
Having said that, credible rummor has it that the new Mac Office 2004 will support Unicode … but only as a first go … a lot of functionality that makes Chinese input in Office for Windows a joy will be left for later improvement. BUT, if they do finally put in Unicode support in within the next couple of months, it will be a great leap for Chinese computing on the Mac.
You’re right, it’s really a pain. Anyway, thanks for your input.
I guess we’ll have to wait then.
You’re right, it’s really a pain. Anyway, thanks for your input.
I guess we’ll have to wait then.
This is what my wife does (since I can not read chinese):
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Open the document and see lines (random crap):
__________2____________8! -
Select everything (Command +A), Select “Clear formatting” from Style in the formatting palette.
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Select everything again, change the font to Apple LiGothic Medium or any other Traditional Chinese font provided by apple.
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See the random now-chinese crap…
If you want to keep the formatting, you can also skip step 2 and do step 3 twice. This really works! :shock: …MS Office internals…
Btw… there is also a language selector tool on the Microsoft Office CD-Rom which should be able to enable Chinese on Mac Office, but it does screw more things up than fix. We use unpatched and un-language-changed versions and it works the way described…
I do not know what happens to the document, when saved and sent back to a windows user, so please try it first on unimportant documents…
Some maybe helpful links:
MS Office v. X 2-byte Patch
Edit: Tried the 2-byte patch and it works as advertised. No need to selecting fonts twice.
The next version of Office for Mac will include full Unicode support. Guesses as to when it will ship range from April to the end of June.
Personally, I prefer to apply the patch – there’s a new version of it (newer than the one offered on the linked site above) that overcomes many of the problems created by earlier versions.
PM me with an e-mail address and I’ll mail it to you tomorrow.