In an earlier post, I mentioned I had trouble getting Word 2007 to stick to my preferred default language settings. Whenever I set the default language manually to English (U.K.), Word 2007 would insist I meant English (U.S.) and prissily put red squiggly lines under words that were spelt correctly. This is, as they say in English (U.K.), “not cricket.” I then tried changing Office 2007’s Primary Editing Language setting to English (U.K.), but this was just as ineffective. Clearly, Office 2007 had deep-seated issues. Did it perhaps still deeply resent Britain’s harsh treatment of Office 1775?
Well, no. The problem actually lies at the OS level. One of my many PC quirks is I use English (U.S.) for my Windows XP language settings on every install. I don’t think I can rationally justify that. The best I can do is weakly claim it’s for compatibility reasons in case some software has trouble dealing with English variants.
(On a side note, Word 2007 alone has support for 17 English variants. If I ever have the time, I would very much like to investigate what makes the Caribbean-variant of English significantly different from the Jamaican-variant.)
I initially thought Word 2007 was simply inheriting Windows XP’s language settings, but the problem is a little more complicated than that. If you’ve got multiple input languages set in Windows XP’s language settings, this will confuse poor ol’ Office 2007. I suppose this is only understandable. After all, Office 2007 is only a major software product with a 17-year history from a Fortune 500 corporation.
To fix this, I had to remove the other input languages. Once I did that, I had no problem whatsoever changing Word 2007’s default language settings to English (U.K.) even though my Windows XP language setting was still English (U.S.).
Now instead of putting a red squiggly line under “colour,” Word 2007 puts a red squiggly line under “color.”
Hell, yeah.
Or as they say in English (U.K.), “Oh, how nice.”
