Foreign language text in MS Excel/Word for Mac

Really hoping someone can help....

I have an Intel MBP running OS X 10.6.2.

I am trying to copy foreign language text (Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada) from a website into both Excel and Word (MS Office 2008 for Mac). Oddly, when I do it I get a variety of results - from all blank boxes representing each character to a mixture of blank boxes and a few characters of the actual language.

Does anyone know what I can do to make this work? I have the above languages installed on my computer and have tried switching the input in the "Language & Text" section of System Prefs. just in case it matters (even though I'm not entering the text manually).

Any insights are welcome.

Thanks.

Do you have the fonts as well as the languages? Keep in mind that MS Word for Mac does not always handle certain languages correctly. Does it work correctly in TextEdit?