Text alignment problems in MS Office Word 2011 (and 2008)

Hi,

I have a very strange and transient problem. I think it has to do with handling files that have come from computers primarily set to write in Arabic text. Sometimes my Word documents align to the right. Even I am saving them with left alignment, but on opening on another computer they are right aligned. It is more than alignment, in fact. Full stops are in the wrong place, which appears to be the behaviour you find if you have a mix of left-to-right and right-to-left formatting. It's curious, because so far as I'm aware, Word doesn't support right-to-left (RTL) languages, like Arabic.

I don't know what is going on, or how to stop it. Highlighting all and setting the Style to Normal doesn't always make any difference. And just tonight something very curious is happening in Word 2011. If I select all and press the button for left alignment, the text goes RIGHT aligned! And vice versa. If I click for right aligned text, it goes LEFT!

If I press Justify, it justifies the paragraph, but the last line is aligned to the RIGHT.

Go figure!

I have basically had problems with Word for a long time, but this is new (I just upgraded to Word 2011). I'm hoping I can get rid of the problem entirely.

BTW: I have Arabic as a language on my mac, but it's second to English. It really shouldn't be interfering with Word.

Hoping someone can help me troubleshoot this annoying glitch.

Thanks!

text alignment hebrew computers

Hi. I have the same problem and it drives me crazy. Large texts with different levels are going nuts about this. \Did you find any solution for it?
Thanks for help. Felix

The problem occurs when your default language is R2L such as Hebrew or Arabic. If you set your system default language to English you will not have an alignment error.

MS Word for Mac is not a very good multi-lingual word processor as it does not support R2L languages. I suggest you take a look at using "Mellel" as it supports R2L languages and is completely compatible with the Word document format. Here is the LINK to their web page.