Hebrew support (or lack there of) for Mac Office 2011 almost one year later

Today I found a tweet question about Hebrew support for Microsoft Office 2011 for MAC. As a Mac and outlook user, the 2011 office suite update was a welcome one. However, when being announced last year it was stated that Hebrew would not be supported. The reasons had nothing to do with a lack of love for the chosen people, but rather a lack of support for Hebrew Unicode right-to-left (RTL). Hebrew, Arabic and Persian are not currently supported due this technical short-coming. There was a comprehensive post back in August 2010 on The Macintosh Biblioblog on this issue if you would like to understand it more and on ZDnet.

So where does that leave us Hebrew typing educators? Has there been any progress since the release?

After scouring through various sites, blogs and forums, I could not find any reference to an upcoming update that would support RTL on Office for Mac. I found some angry posts to Microsoft, some avoiding of the issue by Microsoft support and a facebook page started for people who want RTL support (not a large group): Click here

Will RTL ever be supported on Office Mac? I suspect it will when Microsoft feels that such an update will increase revenue or Bill Gates and Steve Jobs attend their first Bar Mitzvah and want to write a nice Hebrew card in word.

Until then here are some Mac word prepossessing programs that have RTL support:

Mellel

Nisus Writer Pro

Notational Velocity