Microsoft Office supports creating and editing text in any language that is supported by Microsoft Windows. Although your Microsoft Office program tries to automatically identify each piece of text that you type with the correct language, there are things you can do to ensure that a piece of text is identified with the correct language.

Before you work with text in another language in Microsoft Office programs, both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office should be set up with the necessary functionality and settings. Find links to more information about setting up your system in the See Also section.

Note A form created in Microsoft Office InfoPath can be identified with only one language. For more information, see .What do you want to do?

Switch the Windows keyboard layout to control the language you type in

The main thing you need to know about controlling the language of the text that you type is that you should activate the keyboard layout for the language in which you want to create and edit text.

Where can I find more information about using Windows keyboard layouts?

Windows Help provides information about using keyboard layouts.

  1. Click Start and then click Help and Support.
  2. Type keyboard layouts in the Search box, and then press ENTER.
  3. Click a topic in the Suggested Topics list.

Tip Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint provide an option to display a reminder of the active keyboard layout on the status bar. To enable this option, right-click the status bar, and then click the Language option. When this option is enabled, you can also click this segment of the status bar to display the Language dialog box.

Understand how text is identified with a language in Office

Each piece of text in your file is identified as being in a specific language. The language of the keyboard layout that you are using to enter the text is what determines the language identification that is assigned to the text that you type. For example, if you are typing while using the Hungarian keyboard layout, the text that you type is identified as Hungarian.

The language that a piece of text is identified with determines the following:

View and manually change the language of text

In some Microsoft Office programs, you can make sure that a piece of text is identified with the correct language, and if you want to, change the language.

  1. Select a piece of text.
  2. Do the following in one of these Microsoft Office programs:

    PowerPoint or Word

    • On the Review tab, in the Proofing group, click Set Language.

    Note In some cases, the command name is not shown, and all you see is an icon that looks similar to a globe with a check mark in front of it.

    OneNote

    • On the Tools menu, click Set Language.

    Publisher

    • On the Tools menu, point to Language, and then click Set Language.
  3. The Language dialog box (in OneNote the Set Language task pane) is displayed, with the language of the text selected in a list.

    What is the meaning of the double line in the list in PowerPoint and Word?

    The languages that appear above the double line in this list are enabled for editing in Microsoft Office. For more information about how to modify this set of languages, see the articles and .

    Note If your text selection spans several pieces of text, and the pieces of text are identified with different languages, no language is selected. If you need to see the language of each piece of text, reduce the size of your selection, and then try again.

  4. If you want to, you can select a different language for the text to be identified with.

Enable automatic language detection in Word

You can enable an option to make Word detect that the text you are typing is in a different language from the language of the active keyboard layout. This feature can be useful if you often switch briefly into one or more other languages and forget to change the keyboard layout before doing so.

  1. On the Review tab, in the Proofing group, click Set Language (the icon that looks similar to a globe with a check mark in front of it).
  2. Select the Detect language automatically check box.
  3. Review the languages shown above the double line in the Mark selected text as list. If there are languages you use that are not shown above the double line, you need to enable editing of those languages to have Word automatically detect them. For more information, see the article .

View and manually change the language of an InfoPath form

In InfoPath, all text in a form is identified with a single language. You can make sure that a form is identified with the correct language, and if you want to, change the language.

  1. On the Tools menu, click Set Language.
  2. The Language dialog box is displayed, with the language of the text selected in the Mark current view as list.
  3. If you want to, you can select a different language for the text to be identified with.

See also: