How to change the default language in Office 2008?

[jebus197]

Hi, does anyone know how to change the default language in Office 2008 from US English to UK/GB English? I've tried doing it through tools - language, and then selecting UK English and then setting this to default, but it just keeps reverting back to US English (and US spellings) no matter what I do. Surely there must be a way to force Office to use UK English as the default language?

[furby]

I don't think you set the language in office but in system preferences. Have you got it set to UK there?

edit/I can see the UK language where you said. Hmm. Have you tried deleting the Office/Word Preferences files?

/Users/User/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist

Edited November 2, 2009 by furby

[jebus197]

I don't think you're using Snow Leopard? Anyway, in Snow Leopard in system preferences the 'international' panel in your above image has been replaced by a 'Language and Text' panel with a slightly different layout. In here it has a 'spelling' section too, which can be set to the language of your preference. This controls the system wide spelling for all Mac applications - since spelling seems to be included in a large number of these.

Having set this to UK/GB English spellings, the problem seems to have cured itself. (At least for now). This is however an oddity (and probably a bug), since it ought to be perfectly possible to set the language for spelling in Office in the way I described. Indeed this is the way MS recommends it should be done.

However it seems Office checks the localised system wide settings too and that in some cases these can supersede the language settings within Office itself.

This definitely isn't how it's supposed to work though.

[jebus197]

Not a perfect fix either, as the Thesaurus and Dictionary definitions are all In American English still. So for example the word globalization throws up a bunch of synonyms and definitions, but the word globalisation doesn't. It makes me hopping mad not to be able to spell in 'proper' English. Even on Google (something different entirely I know, if I type globalisation and hit search, Google will helpfully ask, did you mean globalization? No I f*@$ing Google! And you can take your American spellings and shove them where the sun never shines too!