Office for Mac 2011 Celebrates Greater China Region Release
This week I am glad to be in Beijing with part of the Office for Mac team to celebrate the release of two new languages for Office for Mac 2011 – Traditional and Simplified Chinese. This is the first version of Office for Mac built specifically for the greater China region, and we are thrilled to welcome new customers to Office 2011.
Launching our product in China is especially exciting because a part of our engineering team is based here in Beijing. The Beijing team works closely with our teams in Redmond and Silicon Valley, and is responsible for the worldwide development of several key components of Office for Mac including Excel. Ever since we started the Beijing team [about 5 years ago], the team has been looking forward to this day: as we bring Office for Mac to the local market, our team can share all of our work with local friends and family. Throughout the development cycle of Office 2011, the team worked hard and used their deep knowledge of the local market to bring Chinese-specific features expanding the power of Office for Mac. In particular, Office for Mac 2011 adds new font support with made-for-China typefaces, Chinese layout support and the suite works natively with the Mac IME.
My colleague, Ricky Ou (Director of Office and Office for Mac in Asia) and I were with the team this week and I wanted to share Ricky’s thoughts on Office for Mac…
We’re excited to release Office for Mac for all of our customers in the greater China region, providing Mac users the Office tools they want to work across platforms. Our local team in Beijing has done a great job building Chinese specific features that are critical to this market. We look forward to enabling users in the greater China region tap into the power of Office for Mac 2011 to collaborate and share documents around the world.
Congratulations to everyone on my team who worked hard to make this release possible!
-Eric Wilfrid, General Manager
Congratualations. But was is with hebrew?
how can i make my english office for mac 2011 become Traditional Chinese?
IS MY FIRST USE OF MAC
Excellent, now will all of these features be included in the English version? Will my English interface change to Chinese if I change my system display language preferences, just like all the other Mac software I have?
Please assume purchasers of any language version of Office are working in multiple languages and want to pick their version based on their native language (mine is American English) but are probably working in other languages (especially, Chinese).
I am an American living and working in mainland China as a Director of Operations. 99% of the documents I review, edit, and approve are entirely in Chinese. I’m fluent with both languages and my office software should be, too, so I celebrate this step.
Moving to Mac presented me with typeface issues from the start. After resolving font collisions and removing duplicates, things improved, but many of the Chinese typefaces readily available on the Windows release of Office are not included in Office for Mac, and as a result, there are differences between what was produced and what I see. This is suboptimal to say the least.
It is both the platform standard and the current design philosophy at Microsoft to make the application non-localized and allow user preferences to dictate display and language preferences. We have no need to save hard disk space for proofing tools and interface resources. What I need to save is time and effort.
Thanks!