Keith Gravell of Cambridge Web Projects knows Microsoft products inside out. And unlike me, he doesn’t see Microsoft as the ‘Evil Empire’.  So I emailed him for advice.

Straight away, he told me something I didn’t know (not difficult!). Apparently, the language is set separately for each document.

That means you can set your computer, and Word, to UK English, but if you get a document from someone who hasn’t done this, their US default will override your UK setting.

It doesn’t make any sense to me. I would expect my computer’s settings to dominate, but that’s Microsoft for you I guess. (Stop it Elaine. They’re not evil dictators. Really they’re not).

Because there are now so many versions of Microsoft Office in use, the best thing to do is go to the Help menu in your version of Word. Or click here to find out more about managing languages.

Detect language automatically feature

Word does have its good points (ouch that did hurt). Keith told me that, Word 2007 has a detect language automatically feature. So if you start typing in any language you’ve set before, within a few words, it will switch automatically to that language.

He told me, “I’ve set Word to UK English, but if I type five or six words in French (which I also use), Word will switch to that language automatically.

“It doesn’t work immediately for pasted-in text – you have to start typing in a language to trigger the change.”

Here’s a Microsoft article on how to set the detect language automatically feature in Word 2007.

And here’s how to do it in Word 2003

Setting the language in style templates

And there’s more.  You can also set the language in each of Word’s built-in styles. The steps below apply to Word 2003, and certainly to Word 2007 for Mac. The standard document template in this version is Normal.doc or Normal.

To change the language for this template:

• Go to Format in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
• Select Styles and Formatting.
• Click on the drop-down options for Normal and choose Modify.
• Select Format in the bottom left-hand corner of the box and you’ll see the Language option.

Click this and the choices will be displayed.

As Keith says, “It may be a pain having to set language choice at both machine and style sheet level within Word. However it does mean you can easily switch between languages or dialects when writing for two markets  – particularly useful if you have a US market.”

It’s all a lot more complex than I think it ought to be but I hope this helps a little.