This article tells you how to change the language of your document in Word 2007, 2010 or 2013. Why would I want to change the language of my Word document? The language that is set for your Word document sets the language in which the spelling and grammar checks work. If you are working, say, at a university that uses UK English, and you use a version of Word that’s set for US English, when you run a spell check (or if you ask Word to highlight errors as you go along), the spelling will default to American English. You will submit your document in the incorrect version of the language.

• All Staff, Faculty, Undergraduate and Graduate Students at the University of Guelph (including all affiliate campuses) and Guelph-Humber can acquire the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2016 for Mac through the Office 365 portal. This version is considered to be a subscription license that is provided free of charge from the University of Guelph and is assigned to your Office 365 account. Public folders on outlook 2016 for mac. This is the recommended version for your work computer.

Changing the Default Language. If you would like to check the spelling and grammar of your file in a language other than English, follow these steps: Login to one of the workstations with your UTORid and password. Under the Start menu, scroll up to Microsoft Office icon and click on Microsoft Word. The program will now open on the desktop.

This can really matter if you’re instructed to use one particular version, and will matter more as you move into submitting articles for journals (which may specify either version of English) or working for a company that uses British or American spelling as standard. If you’re working in the field of, or even just, as I used to, writing documents for the US and UK markets simultaneously, making sure that the language set for your document matches the language you’re working in means that you can run final checks and make sure that you’re using the appropriate spelling. If your document has come from another country which uses a language other than English, for example if you’re working on a document prepared by a translator working out of their own language, you really need to change the language to English before you start editing it, or when you run a final spell check, every word will be highlighted and confusion will ensue. So it’s important to make sure that the language of your document matches the language in which you wish to work.

I receive many documents to proofread which are set for US English but are for a student at a UK university – a quick set of actions is all that it takes, but I fear that students will be penalised if they use the inappropriate spellings for the context. How do I view and change the language in my document? In Word, the language that is set for your document should appear in the lower status bar of your document: From here, you can easily change the language of selected text or the whole document (see below). But first we’ll look at how to add this useful display if it’s not showing. How do I make the language display on my status bar? If the language isn’t showing on your status bar and you want to see it there, right-click anywhere on the lower status bar.

A menu should appear with lots of options to tick. Any item that is ticked will appear on the status bar – this is also useful if you want to view your word count there. Click on Language or tick the tick-box next to it, and your language will appear for ever more in the bottom status bar. This works exactly the same for Word 2007, 2010 and 2013. How do I change the language using the status bar display?

First you need to highlight the text whose language you want to change. You might want to highlight parts of the document (for example if it’s a dual translation in two languages and you just want to set one to UK English, or it’s a localisation and you just want to change one column of a two-column original and target language table), keeping the control key pressed down if you want to select several individual blocks of text.

If you want to change the language of the whole document, go to the Home tab and choose Select to the very right of the tab, then Select All: (or you might press the Select All button on your Quick Access Toolbar if you’ve added it there (marked with an arrow on the screenshot above) – see my article on if you need to know how to do that). Once you’ve highlighted the text for which you want to set the language, click on the language display in the bottom status bar and choose your language: Note: Do not check spelling or grammar has a blue square next to it. Click in this square twice so that first a tick, then nothing, appears in the square. Now click on OK.