Make sure the code page and Unicode character ranges are defined correctly, and make sure you actually type the correct character(s).

Can you at least select the font in Word? If so, what do you type, and what do you see?

Is it a Unicode or a Symbol font?

it's a symbol font, doesn't even show in the menu...

I'll try typing the ranges by hand...

You need to specify Mac or Windows.

Mac Word does not support custom fonts.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295062

MS Word for Mac 2011 (DAMN)...

Thanks!

That's got to be one of the stupidest MS goofs ever.

"Does not support" doesn't mean "they can't be made to work." It just means Microsoft is unwilling to help debug the problem.

Adam Twardoch has covered Word 2011 family/menu name issues pretty thoroughly.

http://typophile.com/node/95677
http://forum.fontlab.com/index.php?topic=313.0

It's literally not showing up at all? My experience is that Office 2011 is not keen on large numbers of fonts. A while back I had a huge number (thousands) installed and fonts kept randomly disappearing from the dropdown menu for no reason. If you think you have a lot of fonts that you rarely use on your machine, try deleting them and rebuilding the font database as per Microsoft's instructions. It worked fine for me once I'd trimmed things down. Also maybe try clearing out alternate builds: I once had a problem where I'd modded an open-source font to make the infant a and g characters default and the new version wouldn't show up as I hadn't changed the font info properly.

Microsoft's take isn't entirely unfair, IMO. What they're effectively stating is that while they undertake to debug against system fonts supplied with OS X and the set supplied with Office, the onus is on a font designer to make their font work, not on Microsoft to find out why some font they've never heard of isn't working (the likely answer being because of a bug in it). It's a bit lame (and I would love if they actually undertook to fully implement the OpenType specification, seeing as they actually co-wrote it), but you can see their perspective.

Microsoft's take isn't entirely unfair,

But the issue seems to be that at least for Office for Mac, you can have a font that installs ok, and appears in every program except Office. At that point, it's a Microsoft issue, yet they don't want to help.

Yes, Microsoft Office 2011 rejects fonts that work perfectly well at the system level and are fully compliant with the various font standards, and worked fine in previous versions of Office. It's not amusing.