For Office 2010 you can buy additional language packs, if necessary. Often they are available for free.

We say if necessary because you might not need to buy anything. Office 2010 is sold with more than one dictionary / proofing tools, though only the main one is installed by default.

The English language release of Office 2010 also includes the French and Spanish dictionaries, thesaurus as ‘companion languages’. Only English is installed but you can choose the other languages from the setup.

All you need to do is install them by re-running Office Setup | Change | Add/Remove Features and choosing the additional components from Office Shared Features | Proofing Tools.

Whichever language or version of Office you have, check the setup first to see what Microsoft has supplied or see our separate list.

The Language Interface Packs (LIP) for Office 2010, Office 2007 and Office 2003 are available for free from Microsoft and often include a spell checker / dictionary as well as the changed menus.

If you only need a spell-checker then downloading an LIP might be an economical choice.

Free LIP downloads are supposed to only be available for languages which don’t have a full local variant on sale – so you won’t find French, German, Japanese or Chinese LIP downloads. However there are exceptions to that rule.

If all that isn’t enough, you can buy the Office 2010 language pack.

These packs have the spell check and other proofing features (where available) plus the language interface pack. Details here.

Language Packs for earlier versions of Office are no longer sold.

Article posted: Thursday, 08 December 2011

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