Changing Word to Work in English

Summary: What are you to do if you know English but need to work in a version of Word that uses a language other than your own? The short answer may not be satisfying, but this tip provides some other helpful ideas. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

Zack is an American working in China and will be doing a lot of writing and design work in Word. The only problem is that his copy of Word (and Windows, for that matter) is in Chinese, which Zack cannot read. He wonders if there is a way to change the default so he can actually use this at work without having to look up the file paths for tools at home every night.

The short answer is that there is no setting or way to do this. You can get language-specific versions of Microsoft products, or you can get multi-language versions. The latter are more expensive, and most companies don't get them. Further, you can't change a language-specific product into a multi-language product; there is just no way to do it that we've discovered.

For more information on internationalization, from a Microsoft perspective, you might want to check out various articles by "Dr. International" at this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/default.mspx

Tip #3395 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Changing Word to Work in English