When you buy Microsoft Office, what language proofing tools do you get ‘in the box’?
Each language version of Office sold is called a ‘localized version’ by Microsoft. The most common is the ‘English’ version of Office sold in North America, UK, Australia, New Zealand and many other places. Though, as we’ll see, even this ‘English’ version has more languages than it first appears.
There are 37 different localized versions sold including English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew and two Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) among many.
The language name of the localized version is really the language of the setup program and language interface that you’ll see in the Office menus and help.
It is also the default language proofing tools that are installed. The exact language variant (eg English US, UK etc or French for France or Canada) is set according to the Windows Regional Settings detected during installation. You can change that later as detailed here.
Some Office Tools like Picture Manager and Document Imaging are ‘fixed’ to the localized language and can’t be changed.,
Whichever local version of Office you buy, the programs themselves are always the same.
Extra Languages
There are additional languages supplied with all localized versions of Office. These ‘companion languages’ in Microsoft speak have the proofing tools (spelling, thesaurus etc) that are available for that language.
English proofing tools are supplied in all copies of Office 2010.
Not all languages are cross-referenced. For example Finnish and Estonian are closely related languages (so we’re told), the Estonian version of Office comes with Finnish proofing tools but the Finnish version doesn’t have Estonian.
Office 2010 in Hindi has an impressive range of local languages while the Spanish version includes both Catalan and Basque languages.
|
Office 2010 localized version |
has proofing tools for … |
|
Arabic |
Arabic, French, English |
|
Bulgarian |
Bulgarian, English, German, Russian |
|
Chinese (Simplified) |
Chinese (Simplified), English |
|
Chinese (Traditional) |
Chinese (Traditional), English |
|
Croatian |
Croatian, English, German, Italian, Serbian Cyrillic, Serbian Latin |
|
Czech |
Czech, English, German, , Slovak |
|
Danish |
Danish, English, German, Swedish |
|
Dutch |
Dutch, English, French, German |
|
English |
English, French, Spanish |
|
Estonian |
Estonian, English, Finnish, German, Russian |
|
Finnish |
Finnish, English, German, Russian, Swedish |
|
French |
French, Arabic, Dutch, English, German, Spanish |
|
German |
German, English, French, Italian |
|
Greek |
Greek, English, French, German |
|
Hebrew |
Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, Russian |
|
Hindi |
Hindi, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu |
|
Hungarian |
Hungarian, English, German |
|
Italian |
Italian, English, French, German |
|
Japanese |
Japanese, English |
|
Kazakh |
English, Russian |
|
Korean |
Korean, English |
|
Latvian |
Latvian, English, German, Russian |
|
Lithuanian |
Lithuanian, English, German, Polish, Russian |
|
Norwegian |
Norwegian, English, German, Norwegian (Nynorsk) |
|
Polish |
Polish, English, German |
|
Portuguese (Brazil) |
Portuguese (Brazil), English, Spanish |
|
Portuguese (Portugal) |
Portuguese (Portugal), English, Spanish |
|
Romanian |
Romanian, English, French |
|
Russian |
Russian, English, German, Ukrainian |
|
Serbian |
Serbian, Croatian, English, French, German |
|
Slovak |
Slovak, Czech, English, German , Hungarian |
|
Slovenian |
Slovenian, Croatian, English, German, Italian |
|
Spanish |
Spanish, Basque, Catalan, English, French, Galician, Portuguese (Brazil) |
|
Swedish |
Swedish, English, Finnish, German |
|
Thai |
Thai, English, French |
|
Turkish |
Turkish, English, French, German |
|
Ukrainian |
Ukrainian, English, German, Russian |
Office has even more languages than the ones listed above. There are free local language downloads available to supplement a purchased copy of Office 2003, Office 2007 and Office 2010. These have the language interface and usually a spell-checker as well.
This is one example of where Office language support is inconsistent. Microsoft says that the free downloads are only available for languages not included in any sold version of Office either as the main or companion language.
Yet the table below that assertion (in bold text and marked ‘Important’) has language downloads that are ARE in sold copies of Office. Basque and Catalan are in the Spanish version of Office 2010. There is a Kazakh localized version of Office 2010 and a Kazakh LIP download.
See Also
- Microsoft Word vs. Spelling Bee champions 2014
- Missing Proofing Tools prompt in Word 2013
- Language and Dictionaries in MS Word
- Do you help Microsoft’s proofing tools?
- Language support in Microsoft Office
- Adding a language to Microsoft Office
- Office 2010 language packs
- Changing languages that come with Office
