Changing Word to Work in English

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 27, 2021)

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

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (3395) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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