Richard BF

I really don’t believe it has come to this, but I’m going to explain roughly how languages and spelling work in recent versions of Microsoft Word. This came about from my guilt for luring poor Word users to my site, looking for a solution for the Australian spelling problem, and finding instead my bitch about U.S. English in Word and no solution.

To clear my guilt, perhaps this summary will help fellow travellers as we wander aimlessly around Word, bug ridden compass in hand and our original inspiration for writing clearly beginning to wane, with Word’s infinite complexity firmly inserted up our collective asses. (U.S. English used intentionally, yadda yadda yadda)

In Word, any part of a document can be marked as a particular language, or the default language. This is separate from the spelling checker, so put that out of your head. Now, the nice thing about being able to mark up parts of a document with different languages, is that you can then have different character sets, grammar checking and yes, spell checking, work in the languages you’ve selected. You see, you don’t configure the spell checker for a particular language, that went away many Word versions ago. What you do is mark your selected text as a particular language, and when you select spell check, it automatically detects the language and selects the appropriate dictionary.

You see, you could have French, English and German in the same document, and when you select spell check from the menu, it will switch dictionaries when it gets to each section of marked text. Same with the grammar checker, same with character sets, and who knows what else. This is a huge change from how it used to work, and I’m amazed Microsoft hasn’t publicised it very well, especially as we’re all so used to telling spell checkers which dictionary to use. How I18N of us.

So what’s the problem with U.S. English always being selected in Australian documents? Well, you’re probably selecting the Australian dictionary in the spell check options. All that does is tell it to use Australian for default language text. Problem is, the standard template, which is loaded from disk when you select New from the menu, is set to U.S. English. Or, you may have switched languages specifically from U.S. English to Australia, without realising that you’ve only switched the language for the text where the cursor is, and anything you add from then on. As we know, the spell checker typically repositions the cursor after each mispelling, so it could very easily wrap and jump into the original U.S. English text, thus switching the dictionary back to U.S. English.

OK, so how do we fix the problem? Well, for current documents, select all in the document, then double click on the language in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Change this to Australian English, and you’re done. You’ve now changed the whole document to Australian. But, there is still the odd bug where this may not always take, and you’ll end up back in U.S. English. And that is where my bitch about U.S. English in Word post begins.

So good luck, and if this has helped you in some way, leave me a comment. 13 people found my bitch post through Google over the past 30 days, maybe you’re one of them?