I am pretty sure that everyone who will read this post has put their hands on Microsoft Office at least once. Some of you used the language setting to change the language of the document you are editing, and you might have even used the built-in spell-checker for Romanian (comes in a different package – Windows version only).

Microsoft Office 2008 - Language DialogSince there is no spell-checker for Romanian in any version of Microsoft’s Office for Mac I have been using the Language setting in order to skip deactivating the ‘Check as you type’ feature while editing Romanian documents. It improves dramatically the visual aspect of editing a document, as it removes the red underlines.

I got the chance to first use Office 2004 for Mac about a year and a half ago, and noticed right away that there was absolutely no way to switch the current editing language to Romanian. Apparently the long-awaited universal binary version of Office (Office 2008 for Mac) does not bundle this option as well…

The whole Mac community in Romania would definitely appreciate a localized version of the spell-checker. People are complaining about this lack of interest, and I sure don’t understand why these packages cannot be platform-independent. But what puzzles me even more is the lack of a complete language menu. I am not saying that Romanian in particular should be put there, as I know for a fact that there are other languages missing too, it is the lack on exchangeability between two Microsoft products: Office of Mac and Office for Windows.