Arabic & Microsoft Word for Mac

I’ve been using macs since OS X 10.4 and one thing that I’ve never been able to figure out is why everytime I opened a word document (.doc) that contained any Arabic text, it would either be split up and written left-to-right instead of connected and right-to-left (in office 2004) or, even worse, not show up at all and instead be a bunch of symbol blocks (in office 2008).

There has to be a way around this. I hate having to open up Word in an XP virtual machine just to be able to read the Arabic, and I don’t want to have to upload and open the doc in Google Docs either.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. Let’s use the sentence: I need a pencil, which is written like this in Arabic:

In in Office 2004, I would see the following rendition of the above text:

And now, in Office 2008, I see the following:

What am I missing here? If anyone knows how to get Arabic to show up correctly in Office 2008′s Word, please let me know! If you’re a member of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, please comment as well.

Update:
I’ve asked a few people who are long-time MAC users and they’ve all recommended using the native TextEdit app instead of MS Word. Not a solution I like, but it’ll have to do.

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