Word can spell and grammar check in many languages, here are three ways to switch the language settings plus how to turn off the pesky automatic language switching.
Microsoft Word has language settings that can apply to a whole document or just selected text. This is vital for multi-language documents but also has an important setting for those of us who only know one language.
Word lets you change the language settings manually in three ways.
- Click on the language label on the bottom (status) bar – this is the best and fastest.
- On the ribbon Review tab – same as from the status bar but slower.
- Let Word automatically change the language – sounds great but, as we’ll see, not so great in the real world.
Language settings on the ribbon
The main Language settings are at Review | Language | Language | Set Proofing Language and this is the method you’ll often see in official help.
Status Bar language setting
Smart Word users don’t bother with that, instead they click the language name on the bottom status bar.
That opens the ‘Set Proofing Language’ dialog directly and has a LOT of important settings.
Set Proofing Language
There’s plenty happening in the Set Proofing Language dialog box. Here’s a look at all the settings starting with the two which we’re often asked about.
Do not check spelling or grammar
A really important and often overlooked setting which totally disables the spelling and grammar for the selected text or whole document.
The common use is for text that doesn’t use any human language like computer code. Or text that brings up many grammar and style alerts – recipes for example.
Changing selected text to ‘Do not check spelling or grammar’ is faster than going through the text choosing ‘Ignore’ for every red or blue underline that Word adds.
Detect Languages Automatically
This choice can also cause trouble either because it doesn’t work as well as Microsoft says or is too quick in changing the settings.
In our tests, we could never get Word to change language correctly or often change at all.
On the other hand, we’ve heard from multi-lingual Office Watchers who are annoyed when Word wrongly switched language on them!
Even if automatic language selection does work, it can’t change dialects. For example, Word can’t tell the difference between English US, UK and Australian or between French and French-Canadian.
Set Proofing Language for ..
This is really important and the source for a lot of confusion so make sure the right choice is made.
- Selected Text
- Current document
Word will default to ‘Current document’ unless some text is selected. Having the cursor in the current paragraph is NOT enough.
We’ve seen plenty of people frustrated with multi-language settings that are caused by changing Set Proofing Language and mistakenly doing it for the whole document, not just the selected text.
Mark selected text as …
Choose a language and dialect from the long list. The “ABC-tick” icon means the spell-check dictionary installed plus grammar and style rules, depending on the language.
Set as Default
The Set as Default button will change the default language for the current template. All future documents based on that template will use that setting.
There’s a notice shown so you know which language is being set and the affected template.
Set the default translation language in Word
Quick change the language setting in Word
Microsoft Word isn’t censoring your politically incorrect language
