You can buy additional languages (proofing and interface) for Office 2010, however details are sadly lacking.

Getting Office language packs was once a tiresome and difficult process. The packs were sold, at high prices, by a third-party company. They were hard to find, order and install. If you were scared off Office language packs in the past, you might try again now.

For more recent versions of Office, Microsoft has streamlined the whole thing and brought it in-house. Language Packs can be purchased for these language groups:

• Arabic
• Traditional Chinese
• Thai
• Turkish
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Simplified Chinese
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• English
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Kazakh
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Ukrainian

The price has dropped considerably from the bad old days, now anyone can buy and download a language pack for just US$24.95, sometimes cheaper. At time of writing the Traditional Chinese pack was on sale for US$9.95.

As we’ve noted before, not all languages have all Office features. Microsoft has a table setting out what is available for each language.

The full set of Office features is only available for English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

It would be worth checking the details before purchasing a language pack because there’s quite a bit of variation and exceptions. Sadly the online product descriptions are fairly useless. Microsoft uses the same boilerplate text to describe each language pack (in English only) with only the last word changed to match the language.

It’s not clear which language variations are included in each language pack. For example the Spanish language pack presumably includes the variations for Spain, Mexico, USA, Argentina, Chile etc but there’s nothing in the product description to tell you.

It would be nice if someone at Microsoft could spare the time to ensure that the product descriptions for each language pack are accurate and relevant to that language. A short description in that language would also seem appropriate, in addition to English.

 

Only Office 2010 language packs are now available.  Office 2007 language packs were withdraw from sale, for no good reason, in mid-2011.

Article posted: Thursday, 08 December 2011

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