Office Global Experience

Find and Replace Special Formatting Options

Office_GXP — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:40:00 GMT

Hello, this is Vyom Munshi again. This blog is the third part of the series of articles on Find and Replace feature.

As you work with Office files, you may want to use the "Find and Replace" feature. There are some advanced settings that can help you in more complex searches. This article applies to Access, Excel, and Word.

Basic Character Cluster Search

Some languages have the concept of a "character cluster." A character cluster is a collection of characters that form a single word or syllable; frequently these clusters are a combination of base characters and accent characters, or diacritics. A simple character cluster is the letter "e" with an accent or "é."

In a basic search with no special features enabled, the entered search characters are only matched against the complete character cluster. For example, searching for "e" will not find "é" and vice versa. A more complex example is shown below for the Thai language:

Search text	Within text	Result
ที่	ที	No match
ที	ที่	No match
ที	ที	Match

Using Wildcards

For more advance searching, you can use wildcard characters to substitute one or more characters. This feature is available for Word, Excel and Access applications. NOTE: In Access, wildcards characters such as the asterisk (*) or the pound sign (#) can be used in find and replace but they must be enclosed in square brackets ([]).

To enable wildcard searching in Word, first click the "More >>" button in the "Find and Replace" dialog.

Then select the "Use wildcards" option.

Character search options:

Wildcard Character	What it Replaces	Example
?	Any single character	s?t finds sat and set.
@	One or more occurrences of the previous character or expression.	lo@t finds lot and loot.

The following examples show the use of the "?" and "@" characters in the Thai language.

Search text	Within text	Result
กิ่?	ฃกิ่ก	Match
กิ?	ฃกิ่ก	No match
กิ่?	ฃกิ่a	Match
กิ่@	ฃกิ่ก	Match
กิ@	ฃกิ่ก	No match
กิ่@	กิ่ก	Match

You can check out other supported wildcards at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/find-and-replace-text-or-other-items-HA001230392.aspx?CTT=1%23BM6#BM6.

Special Options

For even more advanced searching, there are "Special" options available in the Find and Replace dialog for Word only. When you click on the "Special" button, the following options drop-down will display.

Many of these options are self-explanatory and are not explained in this article. In this article we will discuss the RTL Mark, the LTR Mark, the Zero Width Joiner, and the Zero Width Non-Joiner. For a fuller explanation of these characters, please see the previous blog post "Bidirectional text embedding and override."

Character	Description	Example
RTL Mark (RLM)	Bidirectional formatting character usually not visible in rendered text. The Unicode value is (U+200F).		Hello العالم!‏<RLM>
			Hello !العالم
LTR Mark (LRM)	Bidirectional formatting character usually not visible in rendered text. The Unicode value is (U+200E).		Hello العالم!‏<LRM>
			Hello العالم!‏
Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ)	Special formatting used to join two characters which would otherwise not be joined together. The Unicode value is (U+200D).		م<ZWJ>ن
			م‍ن
Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ)	Special formatting used so that the characters are prevented from joining thereby avoiding ligature formation. The Unicode value is (U+200C).		م<ZWNJ>ن
			م‌ن

Thanks to Gwyneth Marshall, Zeeshan Furqan, Sirirat Reinikka and Mohamed Elkugia for their assistance with this article.

Find and Replace for the Arabic Script

Office_GXP — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:42:00 GMT

Hello, this is Vyom Munshi from the Global Experience Platform team. This blog is the second part of the series of articles on Find and Replace feature.

As you work with Office files, you may want to use the Find and Replace feature. If you have Arabic, Dari, Pashto, Persian, Urdu, or Uyghur enabled as an Office editing language, as explained in "My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages," you will see some advanced settings that can help you. You can find these settings in the Find and Replace dialog by clicking the "More >>" button.

The "Find and Replace" dialog box is found in Word, Outlook Word Mail, InfoPath, PowerPoint, and Publisher.

How Do I Launch the "Find and Replace" Dialog Box?

In Word, click "Alt + H" to view the short cut keys, then type "F", "D" and "A" or click on Find → Advanced Find on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

In Outlook Word Mail, click "Ctrl + F" or in the Format text tab of the Ribbon click on the Find button.

In InfoPath, PowerPoint and Publisher, click "Ctrl + F" or click on the Find button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

Clicking on the "More>>" button shows the following options

Match Kashida

A kashida is a character elongation used in the Arabic script to increase the length of the line connecting characters (without affecting the sound or the meaning of the word) and is also used in text justification instead of white-space. More about kashidas may be found in the previous blog post, Bidirectional features in Microsoft Word.

The "Match Kashida" option in the "Find and Replace" dialog is used to ignore or consider kashidas when searching for text. For example, if "Match Kashida" was checked, then kashidas will not be ignored in your search or replacement. Hence, Find and Replace will only find words whose kashidas location and number exactly match those of the text typed in the "Find and Replace" dialog. On the other hand, if the "Match Kashida" option is unchecked, kashidas are simply ignored and words such as (حليم and حليــــــــــم) would be equivalent; searching for the first word would yield both versions.

However, searching with the second version (the one with the kashida) will only find the exact match and not the version without the kashida.

Match Diacritics

Diacritics are optionally used in the Arabic script to indicate short vowels or to change the consonant length. When used in a word, they can affect the pronunciation and meaning of the word.

The "Match Diacritics" option in the "Find and Replace" dialog is used to ignore or consider diacritics when searching for Arabic text. For example, if "Match Diacritics" is checked, then the found words will exactly match the search term, including all diacritics. For example, searching for (احمد) in the given text of (احمد احمـــــد احْمد أحمد أحمـــــــــــــد أحْمد أحمَد) will find (احمد), (احمـــــد), (أحمد) and (أحمـــــــــــــد).

On the other hand, if "Match Diacritics" is unchecked, then the diacritics will be ignored and will not be considered when matching words with searched text in the "Find and Replace" dialog.

Match Alef Hamza

Frequently in the Arabic script, the letter combination Alef with a Hamza (أ) is written simply as an Alef without the Hamza (ا) without affecting the meaning. If the "Match Alef Hamza" option is unchecked, then searching for (احمد) or (أحمد) will find both (احمد) and (أحمد).

Alternately, if "Match Alef Hamza" is checked, then the Alef and Alef Hamza characters must match that of the text used in the "Find and Replace" dialog; therefore, searching for (احمد) will not find (أحمد).

Match Control Characters

This option allows you to exactly match special control characters, such as the right-to-left marks for Bidirectional languages. (The previous blog post, Bidirectional text embedding and override, provides more information about these characters and their possible use.)

This feature is available in Word, Outlook WordMail, and InfoPath. For InfoPath, the "Match Diacritics" option is not availble—as shown in the dialog below:

Thanks to Gwyneth Marshall and Zeeshan Furqan for their assistance with this article.

Find and Replace for East Asian Languages

Office_GXP — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:40:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Vyom Munshi, and I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the GXP team. This blog is the first part of the series of articles on Find and Replace feature.

As you work with Office files, you may want to use the Find and Replace feature. If you have Japanese or Korean enabled as an Office editing language, (as explained in "My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages,)" you will see some advanced settings that can help you. You can find these settings in the Find and Replace dialog by clicking the "More >>" button.

The "Find and Replace" dialog box is found in Word, Outlook Word Mail, InfoPath, and PowerPoint.

How Do I Launch the "Find and Replace" Dialog Box?

In Word, click "Alt + H" to view the shortcut keys, then type "F", "D" and "A" or click on Find → Advanced Find on the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In Outlook Word Mail, click "Ctrl + F" or in the Format text tab of the Ribbon, click on the Find button.
In InfoPath and PowerPoint, click "Ctrl + F" or click on the Find button on the Home tab of the Ribbon.

Hanja with Phonetic Hangul

The "Hanja with phonetic Hangul" option in the Find and Replace dialog is used to find words written in either the Hanja or Hangul scripts. This option is off by default in Word's Find dialog.

Revise Hangul Endings

The "Revise Hangul endings" in the Replace dialog is used to allow users to search for a word that may have a different ending appended to the noun based on the context. For example, when replacing the word "책상" with "의자" in Korean text; "책상을", the end phrase "을" is automatically changed to the appropriate one, "를".

To enable this feature, make sure the Korean proofing tools are installed and the Korean language is added as an editing language.

For InfoPath only, the "Revise Hangul endings" option is available as shown below:

Full and Half-Width Forms

InfoPath, Outlook WordMail, and Word allow you to search for full- and half-width forms. This means the pair A (Unicode 0041) and full-width Ａ (Unicode FF21) and the pair ァ (Unicode 30A1) and half-width ｦ (Unicode FF66) will be considered equivalent characters.

Sounds like (Japanese)

This feature is available in Outlook WordMail and Word; when turned on this feature allows you to treat characters as equal. For example, it will treat the characters in the hiragana and katakana scripts as the same. Once you select "Sounds like (Japanese)" on the Find and Replace dialog, you may then click the "Options" button to select which features to turn on or off.

InfoPath has a similar feature, which you can easily configure.

Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Format Text chunk, click the Asian Typography button.
In the resulting Asian Typography task pane, click the Options… button.
In the Options dialog, select the Japanese Find tab and make any desired changes. Click OK to apply the changes.

Match Kana Type

For Japanese users of Visio, you can have Find and Replace match on the kanji, hiragana, and katakana scripts by turning "Match Kana type" on or off.

Thanks to Gwyneth Marshall and Zeeshan Furqan for their assistance with this article.

My Language Preferences: Office Display and Help Languages

Office_GXP — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:50:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Jimmy Fang, and I am a Software Design Engineer in Test on the GXP team. This article continues the Language Preferences series of our blog. Previous articles of this series include How to: Find my Language Preferences? and My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages by Kate Kelly. With the help from my teammates: Kate Kelly, Tom Moore, Atin Bansal, Vyom Munshi, and Zeeshan Furqan, we will go through the updated Office 2010 Language Preferences experience. These articles will try to cover all the functionality contained in the dialog. In this article, we will explore the Display and Help Languages section of Language Preferences.

Change Office display language

In the Office language preferences window, the Display Language list includes all of the Office display languages that are currently installed on your computer. This list includes the display language of the original Office installation, as well as any added language packs. The item "Match Microsoft Windows" is also on this list so that if you have multiple matching Windows and Office display languages installed, you can get Office to use the same display language that Windows is currently using.

To be able to change Office display language, the Office Display language list must contain at least two languages in addition to "Match Microsoft Windows". You may have two or more Office display languages without installing a language pack explicitly. For example, if you have installed English Office release and Standalone German Project, the Office Display Language list will include English and German beside "Match Microsoft Windows".

In the above language preference window, the Display Language list contains 1. Match Microsoft Windows <default>; 2. English; 3. German; 4. French. This means there are three Office display languages available – English, German and French. The current Office display language is "Match Microsoft Windows". If the current Microsoft Windows language is English, the Office display language will also be English. The number before each language or choice defines the priority to select the display language. 1 represents the highest priority.

How do we change the Office display language to French?

Click on French in the Display Language list and then click "Set as Default" button.
French now becomes the default Office display language. Click the OK button to apply the change. Please note that you can make multiple changes to display, help, editing languages, etc. and then click OK in the end to save the changes.
A message appears to remind you that you will need to restart your Office applications before the display language changes take full effect. Click OK to confirm the change.
Now if you restart Office Word, the Word will be displayed in French if no fall back happens. If you do not restart Word, then the Word is still displayed in English, which was the previous Office display language.

Switch Office help language

Changing Office help language is very similar to changing Office display language.

In the above language preference window, the Help Language list contains 1. Match Display Language <default>; 2. English; 3. French; 4. German. There are three Office help languages – English, French and German. The current Office help language is "Match Display Language". If the current Office display language is English, the Office Help language will also be English. The number before each language or choice defines the priority to select the help language. 1 represents the highest priority.

The number of Help Languages is the same as that of the Display Languages. However, the order of Help Language list is independent of the order of Display Language list.

The following steps will explain how to change the Office help language to German.

In the Help Language list, click on German and then click on "Set as Default".
German is listed as the default in the Help Language list. Click on OK to apply the change.
A message appears to remind you that you will need to restart your Office applications before the display language changes take full effect. To confirm the change, click OK.
After restarting Word, the help of Word will be in German.

Fall Back

Fall back is not very common for general users.

Example – Office Professional and Standalone Office SKU

In this example, the user configuration is:

English Office SKU that doesn't include Visio
French standalone Visio
German language pack for Microsoft Office
Set the Display Language list and Help Language list as follow

In the Language Preferences window above the display language list is (1) Match Microsoft Windows <default>; (2) English; (3) German; (4) French. If the Windows language is English, the Word's display language will also be English. Since English is not available for Visio, neither (1) Match Microsoft Windows <default> nor (2) English will be used as the display language. Next, German will also not be used as the display language because German is not available for Visio. Instead, we will fall back to French and use it as the display language of Visio since French is available for Visio.

Similarly, on the Help side, Visio's help language will fall back to French no matter what the ordering of help languages is.

Example – Office SKU and LIP (Language Interface Pack)

In this example, the configuration is:

Spanish Office
Catalan LIP
English language pack
Set the Display Language list and Help Language list as follow

In above Language Preference window, the display language list is (1) Catalan <default>; (2) Spanish; (3) English; (4) Match Microsoft Windows. Note that Catalan is a LIP which is only available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word will be in Catalan since Catalan is the default display language and it also available in Word. For OneNote, Catalan is unavailable and it cannot be the display language of OneNote. Let's check the second display language – Spanish. Since Spanish is available for OneNote, it will be used as the current display language of OneNote.

The help language list is (1) Catalan <default>; (2) English; (3) Spanish; (4) Match Display Language. Word's help will be in Catalan since Catalan is available for help. For OneNote, Catalan is not available thus the help language of OneNote will fall back to English, which is the next available language defined in the help language list.

View display languages installed for each Microsoft Office program

In the Language Preferences window, if you click on "View language installed for each Microsoft Office program", a table will be extended. If you click it again, the table will toggle to be invisible. This table will give you the following information:

The default display language for each Office program.
The other available display language besides the default display language for each Office program.

In the fall back case described previously, if it is not easy to determine what the fall back display language for one Office program is. Using this table provides the answer – the default display language for this program is the current display language for this program.

It is not possible to determine the current help language for a certain Office program from this table alone thus you have to use the help language list as well. The available help languages for one Office program are the same as its available display languages. By using the help language list together with this table, you can decide the fall back help language for certain Office program.

Special East Asian Features in Office 2010

Office_GXP — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:57:00 GMT

Continuing from the "East Asian Text Layout Features" article, in this article we will explore text formatting features that are specific to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (collectively referred to as "East Asian languages" in this article).

Business Form Wizard

In Access, if you have your computer configured correctly, then you can use the Business Form Wizard feature to easily create common reports. This feature is available only for Japanese and Korean languages.

You must ensure that the Office default editing language is set to Japanese or Korean, as explained in "My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages."
You must ensure that the Regional and Language Options is set to the same language. For example, if you have Korean as your default editing language, then you must also set your Regional and Language Options to Korean as well.
Go to the Create tab of the Ribbon and click on the Business Form Wizard button.
Clicking the Business Form Wizard button brings up a dialog box that contains various templates to create Business forms as shown below.

Japanese Greetings

When creating Mail Merge documents, Word lets you add traditional seasonal phrases and other personal greetings.

You must first ensure Japanese is enabled as explained in "My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages."
Go to the Mailings tab of the Ribbon.
In the Create chunk, click the Japanese Greetings button and choose whether you want Greetings, Openings, or Closing text.
A dialog box will appear allowing you to choose the desired greeting. For example, choosing Greetings results in the following dialog.

Japanese Postcard

Word lets you create Japanese style postcards that can be used for many greeting occasions including New Year greetings.

Word

You must ensure that the Japanese language pack is installed.
You must ensure that the display language is set to Japanese as explained in "How to: Find my Language Preferences."
Go to the Mailings tab of the Ribbon.
On the Create ribbon tab, click the Japanese Postcard button and choose whether you want to Create address side or Create design side.
The options fly-out allows you to Create address side or Create Design side, as shown below.
When you click one of these selections, a dialog similar to the following will appear. The wizard will walk you through the postcard process.

Access

You must ensure that the Japanese language pack is installed.
You must ensure that the default editing language is set to Japanese, as explained in "My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages."
The Regional and Language Options in Windows must be set to "Japanese (Japan)."
On the Create tab of the Ribbon, click the Post Card Wizard button.
On clicking the Post Card Wizard button, the following dialog containing various templates is displayed. The wizard will walk you through the steps in creating a postcard.

How to Enable Sequence Checking and Type and Replace for Thai, Hindi and Vietnamese

Office_GXP — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:35:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Sirirat Reinikka, and I am a Tester on the GXP team. My previous blog articles include Changing Numeral Shapes in Excel and 5 Access Settings for the Right-to-Left Languages. With the help from my teammate, Wirote Petchdenlarp, we will show you how to enable Sequence Checking and Type and Replace in Microsoft Office products to prevent the display of invalid typing order characters in Thai, Hindi and Vietnamese languages.

If you have ever typed Thai, Hindi or Vietnamese text in a document or in any text controls in websites, you may have noticed a dotted circle on the screen along with the character that you just typed. Here are examples as shown in the Facebook update status text control and in the Bing Search box:

What is the dotted circle? Why does this happen?

The dotted circle is the character that displays when the order of the characters you typed is incorrect. For example, when an upper vowel is typed after a leading vowel, or a vowel is typed alone without any base character, you will see the dotted circle. If your internet browser doesn't have a typing order rule implemented, the dotted circle may be displayed.

In Microsoft Office, the typing order rule is called Sequence Checking. It allows you to type a valid sequence of independent characters to form valid character clusters. Closely related to this is another rule called Type and Replace. This rule deletes the previous character and replaces it with a new character within the same group of characters. For example, if you enter a vowel that can replace the previous vowel according to the Sequence Checking rule, Type and Replace will delete the previous vowel and replace it with the new vowel.

The Sequence Checking and Type and Replace rules only apply to Thai, Hindi and Vietnamese text.

Most Microsoft Office applications (e.g., Access, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc.) have Sequence Checking and Type and Replace rules automatically set after setting the default language to Thai, Hindi or Vietnamese. This helps prevent dotted circles from ever appearing in your documents. Some of these applications (Word, Publisher and Outlook) also give you the flexibility to turn these rules on or off to give you full control of how you want your text to look.

As an example, let's walk through how to enable these options for Thai. You must first make sure that you have the Thai language enabled in Office Language Preferences. Go to Start à All Programs à Microsoft Office à Microsoft Office 2010 Tools à Microsoft Office 2010 Language Preferences.

Once the Microsoft Office 2010 Language Preferences dialog appears, under the Choose Editing Languages section:

Select Thai from the language drop down list.
Click the Add button and then OK.

These steps are really important because the language that you select determines the features available in the application. You can find more information at How To Find My Language Preferences and My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages.

In Word and Publisher, the Use sequence checking and Type and replace options are located in Options dialog. Go to File menu tab, select Options, and then select Advanced in the Options dialog.

For Outlook, there is an extra step:

Go to the menu File –> Options and select Mail.
In the Outlook Options dialog, click Editor Options button.
Click Advanced in Editor Options dialog.
The Use sequence checking and Type and replace settings are under the Editing Options section.

To understand more about this, you can do some practice:

Turn on and off Sequence Checking and Type and Replace in Word, Publisher and Outlook
Then type any Thai, Hindi or Vietnamese text in the document and compare the result.

Happy Sequence Checking!

Sirirat Reinikka

Measurement Converter In Office 2010

Office_GXP — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:24:00 GMT

Hello there, this is Peter Liang and I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the GXP team.

Today, we'll explore the Measurement Converter feature that can recognize commonly used measurement units in Word and PowerPoint. It also helps user to convert measurement units between the metric and the imperial measurement systems. The types of measurement units supported by Measurement Converter include length, area, volume, temperature, weight, and speed.

Changes in Office 2010 – from Smart Tags to Actions

Prior to Office 2010, Measurement Converter was part of the Smart Tags feature. In Office 2010, Smart Tags has been renamed to Actions (learn more about Actions here) and has several changes compare to the previous versions of Office such as:

Recognizable words are no longer underlined,
Smart Tags options icon will no longer appear,
And additional data from Actions are available through the context menu when you right click on words, instead of a separate context menu.

Enabling Measurement Converter

By default, Measurement Converter is enabled. If it's not enabled, you can go to File->Options->Proofing->AutoCorrect Options->Actions, and check the options shown below.

Using Measurement Converter

Have you ever read documents containing measurement units that you are not familiar with? Do you want to figure out quickly what the same measurement would be in a measurement system of your choice? For example, if you are accustomed to use miles as a measurement unit and are reading a document about speed limits in countries that use kilometers, then you can right click on the text and find the answer under Additional Actions. In Word, you can click on the selection to automatically replace the text in the document with the selected conversion.

Customizing Measurement Converter

Measurement Converter is available in any language version of Office; it can also recognize measurement units in many languages that are built-in. Below is an example of converting 100 centimeters to feet in Arabic.

You can customize Measurement Converter by adding your own measurement units in any language by modifying the file Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Smart Tag\MetConv.txt. For more details, see Additional Actions->About Measurement Converter.

I hope you have found this article helpful. I would like to thank Mohamed Elkugia for his assistance with this article.

Advancing Multilingual Collaboration with Office 2010

Office_GXP — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:29:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Jesus Barrera-Ramos and I'm the Senior Program Manager Lead for Multilingual Solutions in the Office Global Experience Platform (GXP) team.

Distributed collaboration is crucial in the fast and connected world of today. Companies bring teams together across different locations to solve tough problems and require the best productivity and collaboration tools to help them bridge language and cultural barriers. Research shows that 45% of Information Workers use a secondary language in their daily work. This creates a series of challenges for our customers.

Today, we have the privilege to launch Office to our business partners around the world. Starting today, business customers will be able to enjoy the rich set of features that GXP has included in this new version to enable key multilingual scenarios such as:.

Authoring in another language within a collaborative environment.
Personalization of the Office Client environment to the customer's language and culture.

We've included features like the Mini Translator, which provides on-the-fly translation as users hover over a selected word or phrase. Mini Translator also has the capability to Speak the selected text using Microsoft's Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine. This offers a dynamic way of reading a document in a foreign language and a fun way to learn a new language if you'd like to know how a word or phrase is spoken. If you need to translate a full document in Word or even a full e-mail message in Outlook, it's possible to do this easily from the Ribbon.

Enhanced language tools simplify the multilingual experience by separating ScreenTip, Help and Display language settings, allowing our customers to customize the Office environment to their language and culture preferences. Users can now easily see what they have installed for multilingual support and even access the operating system Keyboard Layout dialog and Office Online tools from within the dialog. Additionally, alternate Outlook calendars, complex scripts capabilities in SharePoint Workspace, Bidirectional text in Word, East Asian layout features, and many others make Office 2010 an amazing product for customers worldwide.

I'm excited about the functionality we've included in this release. It represents a stepping stone in bringing our customers richer tools to collaborate and communicate across locations, cultures and languages. Install Office 2010 and tell us what you think.

Jesus Barrera-Ramos

Understanding Translation Language Pairs

Office_GXP — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:37:00 GMT

Hi there! I'm Sandy Rivas and I am a Software Development Engineer in Test in the Global Experience Platform group. For Office 2010, I worked on the Translation features that are available in Word, OneNote, PowerPoint and Outlook. You can see more articles about the Translator features here.

Through the beta usage of Office 2010, there was a lot of excitement about these new features and people were really exploring the possibilities and uses of the features.

There are three key features within the Translation area of Office 2010:

Translate Document (available in Word and Outlook only): translates the whole document or email message and shows it in a Web browser.
Translate Selected Text: shows translation in the Research pane.
Mini Translator: shows a pop up translation of the selected text.

Through peoples' experiences using these features, we learned that sometimes there was a misconception that the translation wasn't working for a selected language pair. But what was actually happening is that the identified language pair is only applicable to the 'Translate Document' portion of the feature, and the 'Mini Translator' portion of the feature works differently such that it automatically detects one side of the language pair (so there's no need to identify both sides of the pair).

This might sound confusing, so let me demonstrate! Let's do this in Word (but the same would be true for Outlook).

1. Start Word and create a new document.

2. Click on the Review menu, then the Translate button, and then select Choose Translation Language…

Notice the first option (Choose Mini Translator language – Translate to) allows you to set the translation language when the Mini Translator is used. This means that the program will automatically detect what language you're translating FROM (so there is no need to identify that), and it will translate TO this chosen language.
The second option (Choose document translation languages) allows you to set both the FROM and TO translation languages for when you translate a whole document (or email in Outlook). The purpose of allowing you to select both the FROM and TO languages is that you might have a multi-lingual document, and the translation engine needs to know both sides of the pair so that it can properly translate the desired text for the selected FROM language.

In a nutshell, think of it like this. If you are using the Mini Translator feature, it will auto-detect and translate to the desired language. If you would like to translate a whole document or email, you should identify both the FROM and TO languages that you desire for the translation.

And as seen below, you can always tell what translation languages are configured for each of the translation features by clicking on the Review tab and Translate.

I hope this information helps you to be more confident about using and exploring the capabilities of the translation features of Office 2010!! If you have any questions, please be sure and post a comment to this blog!

Until next time…

Sandy

Phonetic Guides, Yomi, Furigana, or “Ruby” Text

Office_GXP — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:10:00 GMT

Hello, this is Gwyneth Marshall again. Today we will continue from the East Asian Page Layout Features in Office 2010 article to describe another East Asian feature in Office 2010 called Phonetic Guides. The terms Phonetic Guide, Yomi, Furigana, or "Ruby" Text are used somewhat interchangeably to refer to an annotative gloss placed above or to the right of characters to aid the user in pronunciation. This is particularly important for logographic languages where the reader may not be familiar with the character or the character has more than one pronunciation.

NOTE: These features require at least one East Asian language to be enabled as described in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages. If additional settings need to be changed, these are noted with the feature.

Office provides methods to annotate text in

Access
Excel
Outlook
Publisher, Word, and Outlook WordMail

Access

Set your Region to Japanese. You will also need to set your default editing language to Japanese.
Create a new empty database.
In the table view that appears, create a new field by typing "LastName" in the Add New Field edit box.
Create a second field called "LastNameFurigana"
On the ribbon, click the down arrow on the View button and change to the Design view.
You will be prompted to save the table, name the table, and click OK.
Click on the text field you just created. In the Field Properties view at the bottom of the window, you should see the Furigana text property.
In the Furigana text property, type the name of the Furigana field you created above, "LastNameFurigana."
Change the view to the Datasheet view.
Change your current keyboard to the Japanese IME and ensure the input mode is set to Hiragana.
Type "ta-na-ka" in the LastName field and hit the Enter key until the IME candidate is accepted. You should now see the Furigana version of that last name in the LastNameFurigana field. See the image below for an example.

Excel

You must first ensure one East Asian Language set as your default editing language, as defined in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages.
Type some text and select the cell.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Font chunk, click the down arrow on the Phonetic Guide button.
Select Edit Phonetic
Type the desired gloss text in the cell.

Outlook

Set your Region to Japanese.
Switch to the Contacts view.
Create a new contact.
You should now see some grey fields above the name and company fields. When you type in a Japanese name in these fields, the Furigana text is automatically filled in. The text in the image below was entered with the Japanese IME (set the input type to Hiragana) and type "Tanaka" and "Kanako" for the last and first names. NOTE: Copying and pasting text into the Last Name field will not create the Yomi text. You must change your current keyboard to the Japanese IME and then type in the text.
To change the values of the Furigana text, click the Edit Yomi... button.
If your Exchange Administrator has turned on the Yomi feature and your Region is set to Japanese, you can see this field in the Outlook Address book.

Publisher, Word and Outlook WordMail

The following images are for Word, but the instructions are the same for Publisher and Outlook WordMail.

You must first ensure one East Language enabled, as defined in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages.
Type and then select some text.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Font chunk, click on the Phonetic Guide button. (NOTE: If this button is clicked in with Japanese set as the default editing language, this feature will automatically provide the phonetic guide for the Kanji characters. Other East Asian languages only provide the space where users manually input the phonetic guide, that is, if the button is clicked.)
You will then be presented with a dialog box to enter in desired gloss text.

The end result will look similar to this:

Big thanks to Grace Sturman, Peter Liang, Vyom Munshi, Seiichi Kato, and Paul Suurs for helping me with this article.

PowerPoint Tips to Better Connect with a Global Audience

Office_GXP — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:59:00 GMT

Hey!! My name is Vinay Reddy and I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the GXP team. I have put together a few tips below you could use to connect better with an international audience. Though this blog has been written keeping PowerPoint in mind, most of the tips mentioned here apply to other Office applications as well.

The world has truly become global. In our daily lives, especially in the business world, we interact with people from different cultures and ethnicities. In this blog, I will share a few tips on how you can make PowerPoint presentations more globally appealing. These tips can send a message to your audience that you understand the local culture/market. A few of the tips listed below may seem minor, but they can touch a cord with the audience and help you evangelize your ideas more effectively. Some of the topics have been covered previously. This blog consolidates all these points into one article while exploring new features.

Tip 1: Symbols

Symbols can speak a lot for themselves. Every culture has its own set of unique symbols. Not all symbols can be easily inserted using a keyboard. However, Office applications, such as PowerPoint, Word and OneNote, allow you to insert Symbols in your presentation or documents. To insert symbols, place the cursor on a placeholder and from the Ribbon, click on Insert à Symbol.

By choosing a Font and Subset pertaining to the culture of your choice (see below), the Symbol dialog displays an abundance of symbols that carry significance in the culture corresponding to the font.

If you are unsure of which font pertains to the culture which interests you, you can use the Font dropdown in the Home tab on the Ribbon to guide you. In the image below, you can tell the font selected is a Hindi font due to the display of Hindi characters next to the font name. This font will expose you to symbols which carry significance in the Indic culture.

Tip 2: Formats

Text, numbers and dates are a critical part of business data. Presenting crucial data to an audience who are less versed with the language in which the presentation is given can lead to unfortunate events. It helps if crucial data is contained in multiple languages. Entering data in any language takes you through a step by step process on how to enter text or numbers in any language. The Date / Time article explains how you can enter dates and times in different formats for different cultures.

Tip 3: Language Features

Changing the editing language preference exposes you to language specific features. This is particularly helpful when preparing a presentation for Right-to-Left language speakers such as Arabic and Hebrew. Editing language preference explains how you can change your language preference, and switch text direction explains how to enter text in Right-to-Left direction as shown below.

Tip 4: Collaboration and Translation

Sometimes, you might want to use the proficiency of the language experts when creating a presentation with multilingual content. In such instances you can utilize PowerPoint's new Co-authoring feature to collaborate with others. During the process of collaboration, it is possible you might encounter text in a language which is foreign to you. In such instances you can use the new Mini Translator feature in PowerPoint to translate the text.

Tip 5: Media Features

Pictures and videos are often a much more effective medium of communication than words, especially when the audience is from a large and diverse multicultural and multilingual background. In this case, you cannot have text translations in a multitude of languages. For instance, a pictorial or video of an architectural model is a more effective medium of communication than a verbal description of the model. Fortunately, PowerPoint 2010 offers a rich set of media features which you can leverage to make your presentation visually appealing and easily understandable to a global audience.

Tip 6: Localized Templates

If you wish to connect to audiences of a certain culture, but you are not using the localized version of Office, you can use localized templates which will help you avoid creating a localized presentation from scratch. These localized templates are available at the Office website where you can choose a language of your choice and press the Go button. This will take you to a localized site where you will find localized sample presentations under the Templates tab.

Let's say you are done creating an informative presentation which truly crosses language barriers. Now your challenge is to present it to an audience who are dispersed world-wide. No hassles!! Now there is a new feature in PowerPoint 2010 which allows you to broadcast your presentation to an audience distributed geographically, be it with folks in the adjacent building or the other side of the globe.

Double Bonanza!! They say a good old trick can never get too old. If you still want additional help in the form of notes which you do not want the audience to see, you can switch to presenter mode, a feature which has been in PowerPoint since 2003. This can be particularly helpful if most of the content in your slides is in a language in which you are not proficient. This will require you to use two monitors.

Any small measures that you take in trying to tailor the presentation to the needs of the audience can pay rich dividends. I hope you found this blog helpful in giving ideas on how you can come up with ways to connect better with an international audience. Feel free to ask questions or leave your responses in the comments section below.

I really enjoyed writing this this blog and my work was made easier thanks to the valuable contributions from Grace Sturman and Sirirat Reinikka.

East Asian Page Layout Features in Office 2010

Office_GXP — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:22:00 GMT

Hello, Gwyneth Marshall here again. Continuing from the East Asian Text Formatting Features in Office 2010 article, we will explore page layout features specific to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, collectively referred to as "East Asian languages". These languages share some characteristics such as vertical writing and glosses above text. In this article, we will cover Genko Settings and Asian Topography Line Breaking Rules.

NOTE: All of these features require at least one East Asian language to be enabled as described in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages. If additional settings need to be changed, these are noted with the feature.

Genko Settings

Genko settings, short for genkō yōshi, refers to the Japanese term for paper lightly printed with square grid background to assist positioning of writing East Asian characters. The feature is derived from writing or manuscript paper which uses a grid or squares; such sheets are often divided into 200 or 400 squares. Each space is used for one character. This feature is available in Word.

Instructions for Word

East Asian versions of Office will have this feature by default. If you don't have one of these versions, you must first install an East Asian language pack.
Ensure one East Asian Language set as your default editing language, as explained in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages. NOTE: The language you select will determine the default Genko settings; for example, Korean has slightly different settings than Chinese and Japanese.
Go to the Page Layout tab of the Ribbon.
In the Genko chunk, click on the Genko Setting button.
You will be able to specify whether to use a line grid or line-and-character grid to control formatting and what measurements are used for the grid so that you can enter characters by using fixed-pitch spacing (as in Genko or Gaozhi formatting).

Line Breaking Rules (Asian Typography)

East Asian languages have a set of rules that defines if characters should not be separated by a line break and specifies valid characters for the beginning and ending of lines. These rules are sometimes referred to as kinsoku shori in Japanese.

You can configure these options globally in InfoPath, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word by clicking on the File tab, selecting Options, and then selecting Typography.

Within a file, you can choose to turn East Asian line breaking on or off by going to the Home tab on the Ribbon and opening the Paragraph dialog. In the Paragraph dialog, click on the Asian Typography tab. Depending on the application, a number of options will be available. Clicking the Options… button takes you to the global settings.

Thanks to Grace Sturman, Peter Liang, Vyom Munshi and Seiichi Kato for their assistance with this article.

Any example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people, and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, or event is intended or should be inferred.

Theme Fonts for My Language

Office_GXP — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:41:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Grace Sturman, and I am a Lead Software Development Engineer in Test on the GXP team.

Theme Fonts were introduced in Office 2007, as part of the document theme concept: Theme Colors, Theme Effects and Theme Fonts. The Theme features are probably most visible in PowerPoint, because of its prominent place in the Ribbon. However, the Theme features are actually shared features in PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook and Publisher. In this blog, I am going to focus on Theme Fonts, and how it is designed to assist working with documents of different languages.

You can find instructions on how to Apply a theme to your presentation, and how to Apply, customize, and save a document theme in Word or Excel on Office Online.

What are Theme Fonts?

Theme Fonts are sets of fonts for Headings and Body text which can be applied to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Publisher documents based on the language of the text. For example, the default Theme Font scheme is called "Office", which uses Calibri font for both Headings and Body text if the text is Latin text; and uses SimSun for both Headings and Body text if the text is Simplified Chinese.

Theme Fonts in the Ribbon

From the Ribbon, you can find out the current Theme Fonts in use for your document from either the Font dropdown or the Theme Fonts dropdown.

Font dropdown

Theme Fonts dropdown

You can hover the mouse over a set of Theme Fonts in the Theme Fonts dropdown, and it will preview what the text will look like with those fonts applied. This "sneak preview" helps you to decide which theme fonts to apply, and we call it the Live Preview feature. It was introduced in the Office 2007 release and was supported in many other Ribbon dropdowns.

If you have a non-Latin language as the default Office Editing languages (See the My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages blog about how to set this), an additional set of fonts will be shown in the Font dropdown.

In the example below, Simplified Chinese is the default editing language, so SimSun font for Headings and Body text is added to Theme Fonts section of the Font dropdown.

Theme Fonts dropdown behaviors

Independent from what your default editing language is, when you set your keyboard input to a certain language and expand the Theme Fonts dropdown, the icons of each of the Theme Fonts will display a character from that language; and the fonts of that language for each Theme Fonts set are displayed. For example, if my current keyboard language is Simplified Chinese, the Chinese character "文" is displayed as the icon for the Theme Font, and Simsun is displayed as the font for Simplified Chinese text for the "Office" Theme Font.

Note that Heading and Body fonts are not always the same. It completely depends on how they are defined in each Theme Font scheme. Neither the "Office 2" nor the "Office Classic" Theme Font scheme has the same Heading and Body fonts for Simplified Chinese text.

All these occur on the fly as soon as you change your keyboard to a different language and expand the Theme Fonts dropdown. Below is the Theme Fonts dropdown after I switched my keyboard to Arabic. Note that the icons are moved to the right side of the dropdown since Arabic displays Right-to-Left. Give it a try, it is pretty cool!

If you have multiple languages in your document like shown below and select the "Office" Theme Font scheme, the appropriate fonts will be applied to Heading and Body text of each language.

Language of Text	Font Applied to the Headings Text	Font Applied to the Body Text
Latin (English in this case)	Cambria Font	Calibri Font
Simplified Chinese	SimSun Font	SimSun Font
Arabic	Times New Roman	Arial
Other language if presents	…	…

Theme Fonts dropdown in different applications

PowerPoint

To access the Theme Fonts dropdown in PowerPoint, from the Ribbon, click on the Design tab. In the Themes chunk, look for the Fonts dropdown.

Word & Excel

To access Theme Fonts dropdown in Word and Excel, from the Ribbon, click on the Page Layout tab. In the Themes chunk, look for the Fonts dropdown.

Word

Excel

Outlook

Start a new email. From the Ribbon, click on the Options tab. In the Schemes chunk, look for the Fonts dropdown. This is really the same as in Word because Outlook uses Word as the email application.

Publisher

To access Theme Fonts dropdown in Publisher, from the Ribbon, click on the Page Design tab. In the Schemes chunk, look for the Fonts dropdown. Note that the UI in Publisher is slightly different from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

These are the basics of Theme Fonts. I hope you know more about Theme Fonts now. Special thanks go to Peter Liang and Vinay Reddy for their contributions to this blog.

Any example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, or event is intended or should be inferred.

East Asian Text Formatting Features in Office 2010

Office_GXP — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:41:00 GMT

Hello, this is Gwyneth Marshall again and this is the second part of a four-part series or articles on East Asian text features. Continuing from the East Asian Text Layout Features article, we will explore text formatting features specific to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, collectively referred to as "East Asian languages". In this article, we will explore, East Asian Text Formatting features, namely Enclosed Characters, Character Border, Character Shading and Character Emphasis.

NOTE: All these features require at least one East Asian language to be enabled, as described in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages. If additional settings need to be changed, these are noted with the feature.

Enclosed Characters

Enclosed characters are characters surrounded by equilateral shapes such as triangle, square, diamond, or circle—commonly used in East Asia to indicate symbols. Publisher and Word allow you to easily enclose characters.

Instructions for Publisher and Word

Type and then select one or two characters.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Font chunk, click on the Enclose Character button.
You will then be presented with a dialog box that allows you to change the default settings. You can either change these settings, or just click OK to apply the changes.
The end result will look similar to this.

Character Border

Similar to Enclosed Characters, but this feature allows you to create a border around a larger set of characters or a whole sentence.

Instructions for Outlook WordMail and Word

Type and then select some text.
For Word, go to the Home tab of the Ribbon. Then in the Font chunk, click on the Character Border button.
For Outlook WordMail, go to the Format Text tab of the Ribbon. Then in the Font chunk, click on the Character Border button.
The end result will look similar to this.

Character Shading

Yet another way to add emphasis to text is to use Character Shading.

Instructions for Outlook WordMail and Word

Type and then select some text.
For Word, go to the Home tab of the Ribbon. Then in the Font chunk, click on the Character Shading button.
For Outlook WordMail, go to the Format Text tab of the Ribbon. Then in the Font chunk, click on the Character Shading button.
The end result will look similar to this.

Character Emphasis

Due to the nature of the characters used by the East Asian languages, bolding often makes the characters unreadable. Therefore, emphasis points are used to emphasize certain text. Note that Simplified Chinese differs in that the emphasis mark is to the left of or below the text, instead of to the right or above the character.

Instructions for Publisher and Word

Type and then select some text.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Font chunk, bring up the Font dialog.
Change the emphasis mark in the Emphasis Mark drop-down.
The end result will look similar to this.

The emphasis characters available and their position will depend on which language the text is marked.

Thanks to Grace Sturman, Peter Liang and Paul Suurs for their assistance with this article.

East Asian Text Layout Features in Office 2010

Office_GXP — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:17:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Gwyneth Marshall, and I am a Program Manager on the GXP team. As we learned in My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages, your Office configuration can affect your Office experience. These settings change such things as your default font and date format. In this four-part series of articles on East Asian text features, we will explore features specific to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, collectively referred to as "East Asian languages". In this first article, we will explore East Asian Text Layout features, namely Vertical Text, Two Lines in One and Horizontal in Vertical Text. The next three articles in the series we will explore Text Formatting, Page Layout and Phonetic Guides.

Vertical Text

You can easily create vertical text in many Office applications.

Instructions for Excel

Select a cell or a range of cells.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Alignment chunk, click the down arrow on the Orientation button.
Select "Vertical Text."
As you type, the text will be displayed horizontal, but once you exit the cell, the text is vertical.

Instructions for PowerPoint

Create a text box or place cursor in an existing text box.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Paragraph chunk, click the down arrow on the Text Direction button.
Select Vertical.

Alternately, within a table:

Go to the Table Tools tab of the Ribbon, click on the Layout sub tab.
Go to the Alignment chunk.
Click the down arrow on the Text Direction button.
Select Vertical.

Instructions for Publisher

Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
Select Draw Vertical Text Box.

Alternatively, you can change the direction of an existing horizontal text box.

Select a text box.
Go to the Text Box Tools tab of the Ribbon.
Click the Text Direction button until the text is vertical.

Instructions for Visio

Go to the Insert tab of the Ribbon
Click on the down arrow on the Text Box button.
Select Vertical Tex Box.

Alternatively, you can change the direction of an existing horizontal text box.

Select a text box.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
Click Text Direction button until the text is vertical.

Instructions for Word

Go to the Page Layout tab of the Ribbon.
In the Page Setup chunk, click the down arrow on the Text Direction button.
Select Vertical.

Alternately, within a table:

Go to the Table Tools tab of the Ribbon, click on the Layout sub tab.
Go to the Alignment chunk.
Click the Text Direction button until the text is vertical.

Asian Typography

Word provides some East Asian specific formatting features under the Asian Typography button on the Home tab. We will cover two of these features in this article, namely Two Lines in One and Horizontal in Vertical.

These features should not be confused with the Asian Typography feature available in the Paragraph dialog that will be described later in the East Asian Page Layout article.

Two Lines in One

For layout purposes, the user may want to combine two lines into one line. Word allows you to easily do this.

Type and select some text.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Paragraph chunk, click the down arrow on the Asian Layout button.
Select Two Lines in One...
You will then be presented with a dialog box to format your text.
The end result will look similar to this.

Horizontal in Vertical Text

There may be instances in your vertical text that characters some characters need to be oriented horizontally, for readability or for stylistic reasons. You can use the Horizontal in Vertical text feature available in Publisher, Visio, and Word.

Instructions for Publisher

Type some vertical text and then select one or two characters.
Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon.
In the Paragraph chunk, click on the Horizontal in Vertical button.
You will then be presented with a dialog box to change the font settings.
Make any required changes and click the OK button.

Instructions for Visio

Type some vertical text.
Select and right-click on one or two characters.
In the resulting context menu, select the Horizontal in Vertical menu item.
A dialog will ask you to confirm your selection.

Instructions for Word

Follow the instructions for Asian Typography, and choose Horizontal in Vertical…

Thanks to Grace Sturman, Peter Liang and Paul Suurs for their assistance with this article.

My Language Preferences: Office Editing Languages

Office_GXP — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:27:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Kate Kelly, and I am a Program Manager on the GXP team. My previous blog articles include How to: Find my Language Preferences? and How do I check spelling and grammar in a different language in Office 2007?. With the help from my teammates: Jimmy Fang, Atin Bansal, Tom Moore, Vyom Munshi, Gwyneth Marshall and Paul Suurs, we will go through the updated Office 2010 Language Preferences experience over the coming months. These articles will try to cover all the functionality contained in the dialog. We will start by exploring the Editing Languages section of Language Preferences.

One way to launch Language Preferences is Start à All Programs à Microsoft Office à Microsoft Office 2010 Tools à Microsoft Office 2010 Language Preferences. There are also some other ways to get to this dialog which are detailed in my earlier blog post.

The Editing Languages list is at the top of the Language Preferences dialog. For many customers based in the United States, this screen shot is the default view for Language Preferences.

In the Editing Languages section you can add new editing languages, delete existing editing languages, and set an editing language as the default. You can also check the status of spellers, grammar checkers, and other proofing tools, and keyboards for your enabled editing languages.

Add Editing Languages and Set a Default Language

To add a new editing language, select the language of your choice from the dropdown. By default, it shows [Add additional editing languages]. Then click on Add button to add the language to your list of editing languages:

Language Specific Features

Some features will be enabled for Office applications after an editing language is added. For example, if a right-to-left language, such as Arabic or Hebrew, is added to the Editing Language list, the Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right Text Direction buttons will be added to the Word ribbon. If Chinese (PRC) is included in the Editing Language list, the Enclose Characters button will appear in the Word ribbon.

To remove an editing language, you can select an Editing Language and then click the Remove button. However, you cannot remove the default editing language directly. To remove an editing language that is set as <default>, you must first set another language in the Editing Language list as the new default language, and then remove the previous default editing language by clicking the Remove button.

You may click on one of the editing languages and then click the Set as Default button to set this language as default editing language. By setting one language as the default editing language, you will observe that some language-specific defaults change in your Office programs. For example, if Arabic is selected as the default editing language in Language Preferences, the typing order of a Word document will be from right-to-left and the first column in an Excel spreadsheet (column A) is located on the right side of the screen.

See If You Have the Proofing Tools You Need!

What are Proofing Tools?

Proofing Tools are features that help the user create and edit documents. There are a wide variety of Proofing Tools available. The type depends on the language you are using. Some examples are spell checkers, grammar checkers, thesaurus, auto-correct lists, style checkers, hyphenators, and translation dictionaries. More information may be found here.

When you add another editing language, the Office 2010 Language Preferences quickly lets you know if you already have the Proofing Tools installed. If one language is in the editing language list and a speller exists on your computer for this language, the column, Proofing (Spelling, Grammar…), will be marked as Installed for the corresponding language. Otherwise it will be marked Not installed. The Not installed status is a hyperlink which will take you to the Web to get more Proofing Tools.

How Does Language Preferences Help with Keyboard Layouts?

Language Preferences contains the Windows' keyboard status for Editing Languages. If you have more than one keyboard enabled, you will see the Language Bar in your Task Pane. The Language Bar allows you to toggle between keyboard layouts.

If the editing language you added to your list does not have a keyboard enabled, a Not enabled link will appear which directs you to the Windows Control Panel to add additional keyboards. You can find more information about enabling a keyboard in a previous article.

Check out different keyboard layouts with this neat tool!

You can also see your keyboard layout on-screen with the On-Screen Keyboard (Start à All Programs à Accessories à Ease of Access à On-Screen Keyboard).

Make sure you click the OK button at the end to apply your changes. You may be asked to restart your Office applications before the changes take effect.

If you have any questions, please leave a note in the comments!

Where are the illumicons?

If you were wondering where the illumicons are, they have returned to their home planet and left the blog duty for the GXP team. Their decision to take this action was based on the feedback from the reader survey recently done here. This will give the GXP team members the opportunity to directly talk to our readers.

The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people, and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, or event is intended or should be inferred.

What are Proofing Tools?

TechNet Archive — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:24:00 GMT

Q&A

What are Proofing Tools?

The question that we shall share with you today has to do with Office 2010 Proofing Tools.

-- Before The Professor publishes his series called "My Language Preferences"…--

-- We need to teach you about proofing tools! –

-- Did you know Office 2010 Proofing Tools include a spell checker, grammar checker, thesaurus, and translation dictionaries for several languages? --

Question: What are Proofing Tools?

Answer: Proofing Tools are features that help the user create and edit documents. Document Proofing Tools include the following:

Tool	Functionality
Spelling checker	Flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly and may provide suggested replacements
Grammar/Style checker	Verifies written text for grammatical correctness and detects stylistic problems
Thesaurus	Lists synonyms and antonyms of words (if any are available)
Translation Dictionaries	Allows you to translate single words or short phrases
AutoCorrect List	Fixes typos and misspelled words and inserts symbols and other pieces of text
Hyphenator	Automatically breaks words at the end of lines and adds hyphens to help justify text within a line
Contextual Speller	Flags words that are spelled correctly but are not the correct words in the given context

The availability of the different proofing tools varies based on the localized version of Office you are running or the Language Pack(s) you have installed. You can find this information for Office 2007 here. This may be different for Office 2010.

There are several languages of proofing tools that come with each localized version or language pack. See here for Office 2007 availability. This may be different for Office 2010.

Question: How do I access these proofing tools?

Answer:

-- We just explained proofing tools! --

-- No, silly, they want to know how to use them. --

-- Well, we can use Microsoft Word 2010 as an example then! --

Spelling and Grammar/Style Checker

1) Microsoft Word alerts you of a spelling error with a squiggly red line and a grammar or style error with a squiggly green line.

2) To access the spelling and grammar/style checker in Word, you first navigate to the Review tab.

3) You can then access the spell checker with the Spelling & Grammar button.

You can access the Spelling & Grammar tool with a keystroke as well; simply press F7.

Thesaurus and Translation Dictionaries

1) You must first place the cursor on or select the word you want to find a synonym or translation for.

2) Next, you can use the right click menu to look up Synonyms (1) or Translate (2).

3) Another way to access the same information is the Thesaurus (1) and Translate (2) buttons on the Review tab.

4) Most of the information populates in a section on the right side of the page called the Research and Reference Pane. The Thesaurus task pane can also be invoked with the Shift+F7 shortcut. You can enter words in the "Search for: field directly here and choose the reference to use.

5) You can also access the Research and Reference Pane through the button on the Review tab.

AutoCorrect List

1) The AutoCorrect list is accessible through the main Options menu under the File tab.

2) In the Word Options menu, click on the Proofing menu and then the AutoCorrect Options button.

3) You can change any of the AutoCorrect options through this menu.

4) You may also see an AutoCorrect button pop up in your document when you take certain actions in your document. For example, typing a number followed by a parenthesis will trigger automatic numbering. Clicking on the AutoCorrect button will allow you to stop automatic numbering or change other AutoFormat options.

Hyphenator

Hyphenation options are in the Page Layout tab under the Hyphenation drop down.

Keep the questions coming!

The Twins

--Oh! I almost forgot! I have to thank Viral Shah, Tom Moore, Jimmy Fang, and Paul Suurs for their help with answering this question!--

--Uh huuuuh! I knew you didn't do it by yourself!–

-- Anyhow, they all work on the Office Global Experience Platform team at Microsoft!--

The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, or event is intended or should be inferred.

Bidirectional Features in Microsoft Word

the_gxp_wizard — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:27:00 GMT

Tips and Tricks by the Wizard

Bidirectional Features in Microsoft Word

Hello,

The tips and tricks that I shall share with you today have to do with bidirectional (Bidi) features in Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word was designed to work with multilingual documents. It is capable of fully representing writings of different languages and scripts including Bidi scripts (such as Arabic or Hebrew). Bidi scripts are written from right-to-left (RTL) while numbers and other scripts are written from left-to-right (LTR).

Word will automatically tag text with the appropriate text direction based on the keyboard language from which it was entered. Numbers and neutral characters such as spaces and punctuation can layout or shape differently based on its tagging.

Options

Word has a number of options that affect settings for all documents and affect how contents are displayed. You can get to these options through Office button à Word Options à Advanced à Show Document Content.

Digit Substitution: Specify the type of digits/numerals in a Word document. These can be different from what is specified in the OS Control Panel settings. See section 3, "Using the Hindi Numerals" in my 5 Access Settings for the Right-to-Left languages blog.
Colored Diacritics: In Word you can change the color of diacritics by selecting the Use this color for diacritics option. For example, the following shows the diacritic as red.
Document View: This option affects how content is displayed in the whole document (Right-to-left or Left-to-right).

Section Direction

You can change the direction of a section in your document by changing the Page Layout à Page Setup à Layout à Section direction field.

This affects the text flow within that section including column flow and line numbering. Alternately, there is a checkbox in the Page Layout à Page Setup à Columns à More Columns dialog that will change the section direction to RTL if checked.

Also, if a gutter margin is needed, you can specify the Gutter position to be on the right or left side. If you have different odd and even headers and you choose Right, the gutters of odd-numbered pages will appear on the right, and the gutters of even-numbered pages will appear on the left.

Tables & Paragraphs

You can change the direction of the flow of cells in a table by changing the Table direction field in the Table Properties dialog.

The paragraph direction can be set by clicking on the appropriate button in the Paragraph chunk under the Home tab.

Most Bidi features depend on the editing language(s) enabled in Office. Please refer to the article How to type in my language using office 2010 if you are not familiar with the concept of an Office editing language.

Kashida Justification

You can add Kashidas to Arabic text and other related scripts to help in line justification. There are three types supported in Word, Justify Low, Justify Medium, and Justify High, which affect the number of Kashidas used.

Kashida (also known as tatweel) is a character elongation used in Arabic language to increase the length of words for justification. It does not affect the sound or meaning of the word. It is used in text justification instead of white space. Kashidas are entered automatically in line justification or can be entered manually using the Shift+J keys between two Arabic characters on an Arabic keyboard. Note: you can enter multiple Kashidas (see the following example).

No Kashida	One Kashida	10 Kashidas
L+K	L+Shift+J+K	L+Shift+J(10 times)+K
من	*مـن*	*مــــــــــــن*

Character Properties

You can change the font, size, and style used to render complex scripts which is a superset of bidirectional text. You can do so in the Font dialog under the Font chunk in the Home tab. Under the Complex scripts section, you can choose the font, size, and style used to render complex scripts.

Word automatically combines Arabic characters into ligatures as appropriate. However, if you need to separate characters (e.g., for part numbers), or want to show the initial, medial, or final shape of a character without typing a character after it (e.g., for educational purposes), you can insert Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ) or Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) characters (respectively).

You can insert these characters by using the Symbol dialog (Insert à Symbols à Symbol à More Symbols). Open the dialog, select the font that you are using, enter the Character code for the special character that you want using the English keyboard (ZWNJ à 200C; ZWJ à 200D) and click on Insert. Note that the Symbol dialog will highlight a blank space if you follow this procedure, but it will show a description of the character so you will know that you have selected the correct one (see the following example).

It is also easy to insert these characters using the keyboard. With an English keyboard, type the character code in the document and follow it immediately with Alt+X. With an Arabic keyboard, you can simply press Ctrl+Shift+2 for ZWNJ or Ctrl+Shift+1 for ZWJ.

Here is some bonus information for advanced users. You can change the text direction tagging in the document by using built-in macros in Word by running the RtlRun macro to mark text as right-to-left or LtrRun macro to mark text as left-to-right. For more information on directional tagging, see Bidirectional text embedding and override.

If you have questions, I'm always available – just leave a note below and I will respond as soon as I can!

Happy Bidi Editing!

The Wizard

Oh, I must give credit to two of my apprentices, Ziad Khalidi and Mohamed Elkugia for their significant contribution on this article. Ziad is a Software Development Engineer and Mohamed is a Software Development Engineer in Test, both work at Microsoft with the Office Global Experience Platform team (GXP) based out of Redmond, Washington, USA. I'd also like to thank Peter Liang and Paul Suurs for their assistance on this article.

Useful tricks and shortcuts for users around the world

the_gxp_wizard — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:40:00 GMT

Tips and Tricks by The Wizard

Useful tricks and shortcuts for users around the world

Hi,

Many users prefer to use keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse for convenience and to save time. Let me share with you 5 shortcuts and tricks that all users around the world will find useful.

intl.cpl to open Regional and Language Options

The normal way to open Regional and Language Options is to open the Control Panel, then open Regional and Language Options. A faster way to do this is to type intl.cpl in the Run window (Press Start button and then click Run)

Once you click OK, Regional and Language Options will open up.

Regional and Language Options is a Windows Control Panel applet for changing locale settings for user locale, number/currency/date/time format, keyboards, system locale, etc.

Ctrl + Shift to change Text direction

If you do not have a RTL version of Office or a RTL language Single Language Pack installed, you must add a Right-to-Left (RTL) language keyboard like Arabic (Saudi Arabia) or a RTL language as an Editing language in Microsoft Office Language Preferences to enable RTL features like switching Text direction.

Ctrl + the right Shift key changes Text direction to Right-to-Left. Ctrl + the left Shift key changes Text direction back to Left-to-Right.

In a Left-to-Right environment, the default text direction is Left-to-Right. Notice that Left-to-Right text direction button is enabled.

If the user presses Ctrl + the right Shift key, the text direction becomes Right-to-Left. Notice that the Right-to-Left text direction button is now enabled.

To change text direction back to Left-to-Right, the user can press Ctrl + the left Shift key.
Alt + Shift to change keyboard

Multilingual users who have multiple keyboards enabled will find it useful to use Alt + Shift to change keyboards.

In the example below, a user has the following keyboards enabled on his machine – Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Hindi, Japanese and English (United States). Using Alt + Shift, a user can easily switch between the four different keyboards.
Right Alt + Number for Indic numbers

To insert Indic numbers (or Devanagari numbers), a user can switch the keyboard to Hindi (you can use Alt + Shift to change the keyboard to Hindi as seen in tip #3) and then use the right Alt key + any Number to insert an Indic number

Lets say a user changes the keyboard to Hindi. He or she can then just press the right Alt key along with any number key in the main keyboard section (not the number key section on the right that requires Num Lock to be on) to type an Indic number. So, with a Hindi keyboard, pressing the right Alt key & typing 1 will enter १, pressing Right Alt & typing 2 will enter २ and so on.
Alt + X to display Unicode code

Using the left Alt key + X, a user can insert a hexadecimal code using a Unicode character or insert a Unicode character using hexadecimal code.

A user can type A followed by the left Alt key + X to get the hexadecimal code for A, which is 0041(0041 in Hexadecimal and 65 in Decimal). Also, 0041 (or 41) followed by the left Alt key + X would give A, which is the Unicode character for 41.

Alas, that is all I have to share for today. Practice this well, and next time, I shall show you more tips and tricks.

If you have questions, leave a note below and I shall respond.

The Wizard

Oh, I must give credit to one of my apprentices, Prasad Sangekar for assisting me in gathering this information for you. Prasad works with the Office Global Experience Platform team as a Software Development Engineer in Test at Microsoft. Prasad is originally from India but he and his team work in Redmond, Washington, USA. His teammate Viral Shah also kindly contributed to this article. Prasad and Viral’s team specifically focus on making sure the Office applications are ‘world-ready’!

Office Global Experience Team Blog Survey Reminder (February, 2010)

Office_GXP — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:21:00 GMT

Dear Readers,

We are about to close our February survey this Saturday. We really would love to hear your thoughts about our Office Global Experience Team Blog. This is your chance to tell us what you like or dislike about our blogs and what topics interest you. Your feedback will directly influence the future of our blogs!

Please fill out this short survey (5 questions).

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

The Office Global Experience Team Bloggers

Q&A: What’s the difference between UI ‘Flipping’ and UI ‘Mirroring’?

TechNet Archive — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:17:00 GMT

Q&A

What's the difference between UI 'Flipping' and UI 'Mirroring'?

-- Wow, it seems like forever since we've had a posting out here.

-- Yeah, well if you weren't so distracted with other things – it would be much easier to FOCUS!

-- Oh focus on this, Smarty Bulb! What's the difference between 'Flipping' and 'Mirroring' – isn't it the same thing?

-- No, it's not the same thing. At first glance – it might APPEAR to be the same thing – but actually – it's very different – let me tell you about it!

Among the new and cool features in Office 2010, is the new look of Office dialogs for Right-to-Left (RTL) languages like Arabic. Dialogs in RTL languages should flow from right-to-left, which requires extra work to implement. Traditionally we have used a technique called 'Flipping', where we manually change the position of the controls so that they flow right-to-left.

Here is an example of how a dialog appears before and after flipping:

Find and Replace dialog in Left-to-Right layout (LTR) in Office 2007 and older versions.

Find and Replace dialog in Right-to-Left (RTL) Flipped layout in Office 2007 and older versions.

Even though most of the dialog looks RTL, there are still several controls which we cannot reposition manually. As you can see:

The title is right aligned
The Close and Help buttons are still not positioned to the top left
The Tabs on the dialog are still LTR, and the button shadows still fall on the right side.

So while this dialog is 'flipped' – it still has some shortcomings of where it should be for a true Right-To-Left dialog. Flipping also involved a lot more manual processes.

For Office 2010, we invested in a technology called 'Mirroring' provided by the cool people over in the Windows group. In normal dialogs, controls are positioned on a grid which flows from left to right. If we tell Windows to treat the dialog as mirrored, Windows actually mirrors the underlying grid so that it flows from right to left. This means that all the controls are automatically repositioned without any manual effort. This technology creates much more accurate RTL dialogs and also reduces the manual work required. Hey – we're all into efficiency!!

Here is same dialog before and after using mirroring in Office 2010:

Find and Replace dialog in Left-to-Right layout in Office 2010.

Find and Replace dialog in Right-to-Left Mirrored layout in Office 2010.

This new technology is now implemented and integrated in almost all RTL Office dialogs, in all major applications.

-- Ok – that is cool to know the difference between 'Mirroring' and 'Flipping'. Too bad your MIRROR FLIPS every time you look into it!

-- Oh you are just soooo funny. NOT!

-- Hee hee hee, I am very funny, aren't I!

-- How about you take that humor and answer a question!

-- Indeed I will! Bring it on!!

Keep the questions coming!

The Twins

--Oh! I almost forgot! I have to thank Mohamed Elkugia for help with answering this question, and Sandy Rivas and Steve Condie for lending a hand!--

--Uh huuuuh! I knew you didn't do it by yourself!–

-- As I mentioned, Mohamed and Sandy are Software Development Engineers in Test, and Steve is a Software Development Engineer. They are all with the Office Global Experience Platform team at Microsoft.--

How to turn on/off Auto Keyboard switching?

TechNet Archive — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:17:00 GMT

Dear Scenari,

How can I turn on/off Auto Keyboard switching?

Dear Scenari,

I am a bilingual student who uses Word and PowerPoint a lot for my project. My documents and presentations always contain text for both English and another language. With two languages in my document, I have to switch the keyboards very often while I edit the documents. Sometimes I forget to switch the keyboard to match the language I want and I have to retype. Is there a way you can suggest to solve this problem?

Sincerely,
Bilingual student

Dear Bilingual student,

Glad that you ask! You are not the only one that has this kind of problem. Many bilingual users have this problem with their documents as well. But, you know what? Office 2010 has a feature that helps users switch keyboard automatically to match their language in the following applications: OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.

Here’s how it works! Turn on the “Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text” option. Once the option is on, it changes the keyboard's layout to the language that matches the text adjacent to the cursor's position. For example, if your document contains both English and French text, and you move your cursor from English text to French text, the keyboard layout switches from English to French. This has the same result as when you manually switch the keyboard layout from English to French using the Language bar. If you don’t want the application to switch the keyboard automatically, you just turn the option off. Isn’t it easy?

Now I will show you how to turn on/off the option in Word, but it would be almost the same for other applications.

In Word, click on the File ribbon tab, and then click the Options button
In the Word Options dialog, select the Advanced tab
Under the Editing Options section, check the “Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text” option

The “Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text” option is only visible after you enable a keyboard layout for a language. If you do not see this option, enable a keyboard layout for the language that you want to use.

Now you don’t have to worry about switching the keyboard to match the languages you want to edit. I hope you find this useful!

Scenari

Oh dear me, I must give special thanks to Pensiri Osangthamnont for her invaluable assistance with this article!. Pensiri works in the Office Global Experience Platform team as a Software Development Engineer in Test at Microsoft. Pensiri is originally from Thailand but she and her team work in Redmond, Washington, USA. Also, thanks to Tom Lavoy for contributing to this article.

Quick Access to Mini-Translator (or other features)

the_gxp_wizard — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:43:00 GMT

Tips and Tricks by The Wizard

Quick Access to Mini-Translator (or other features)

Hello My Apprentice,

I am very pleased to see you back here for MORE tips and tricks of the Office global features. This time I shall share the magic of how to quickly access features in Office with the focus on Mini-Translator feature. I will cover how to easily access Mini-Translator or any other feature by customizing Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and customizing the Ribbon.

QAT can be easily customized to include any feature for quick access. For this blog, we will show how to add the Mini Translator feature. Now , you may ask, “Exactly WHAT is a Quick Access Toolbar?” – good question! It is the little toolbar that appears at the very top of your application’s window:

It has some default functions in there – but you can customize them to your needs. Hence this article! Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Accessing Mini-Translator via Quick Access Toolbar:

1. Start by launching Word, and open the Backstage View by clicking on the File button.

2. Click Options in the Backstage View to launch the Word Options dialog.

3. In the Word Options dialog, click Quick Access Toolbar, then in the Choose commands from: drop-down menu, select Review Tab.

4. Select Mini Translator from the scroll box and click Add > >.

5. Click OK, and the Mini Translator icon will now appear in the Quick Access Toolbar.

You can also add the Mini Translator feature in the Ribbon by using the following steps:

1. Start by launching Word, and open the Backstage View by clicking on the File button.

2. Click Options in the Backstage View to launch the Word Options dialog.

3. In the Word Options dialog, click Customize Ribbon, then in the Choose commands from: drop-down menu, select All Commands.

4. Create a custom tab or a new group by clicking New Tab or New Group button, and it will be added just below where your cursor is located in the Main Tabs list. (You can rename the Tab or the Group using the Rename… button).

For example – the ‘Home’ tab was highlighted for me, I clicked New Tab and it created a new tab and a new group right underneath the ‘Home’ tab. I renamed the tab and group to Language and Translation as you see below.

5. Select the newly added group, now navigate to and select Mini Translator from the All Commands list and click the Add >> button to add it to the new group.

6. Click OK.

See images below:

Toggle the Mini Translator icon by clicking it on and off. If the icon is highlighted, it is on. If it is not highlighted then it is off.

Did you know that you can customize QAT and the Ribbon by right clicking on the command in the ribbon as shown below?

You can find more tips in our partner team's Making the Ribbon Mine blog.

Ok – let’s combine two skills here! Try adding Mini Translator to the QAT and translate your text.

It might be a little more complicated than most pop quizzes – but I’m confident you can handle it!
If you want some pointers and to learn more about Mini Translator, visit the articles here.

Alas, my apprentice, you’ve learned TWO valuable tips today – the Quick Access Toolbar AND customizing the ribbon. Now, practice these and customize any of your Office applications’ QAT and Ribbons to appear as you wish! Indeed, Office provides some magical features for you!

If you have questions, leave a note below and I shall respond.

The Wizard

Oh, I must give credit to Ahmad Abu-Dayah for helping me write this blog. Ahmad Abu-Dayah is a Software Test Manager at Microsoft working with the Global Experience Platform team. Also, thanks to Sandy Rivas for contributing to this article.

Office Global Experience Team Blog Survey (February, 2010)

Office_GXP — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:32:00 GMT

Dear Readers,

We have now been writing this blog for six months and we would appreciate hearing your feedback!

Please fill out this short survey (5 questions) and let us know what you think about the Office Global Experience Team Blog.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

The Office Global Experience Team Bloggers

Project Web Access Language and Regional Settings

the_gxp_professor — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:55:00 GMT

A Lesson by The Professor

Project Web Access Language and Regional Settings

Hello students!

In Microsoft Office Project 2007, you could install language packs (LPKs) but could not view the list of languages installed. In addition, the language displayed was chosen by your browser’s language settings. In Project 2010, the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) will allow access to all the language packs installed for Project Web Access (PWA). This will give you the freedom and control to change the language of the User Interface (UI) on the fly. Furthermore, Project Server offers the flexibility of altering regional settings on the fly. In this lesson, I will explain how to change the Regional and Language Settings for PWA and the expected behavior.

WSS Regional Settings

The Windows Shared Services (WSS) Regional Settings in Microsoft Project Server offers you a unified cultural experience and provides formatting appropriate to the locale for your sites. Date and time formatting information is pulled from SharePoint. When provisioning a PWA instance, the WSS Regional Settings for the top-level of site collections are set by default to those of the base language locale of the site collections (for example, English (U.S.)). The Site Administrator can customize the default Server Site Locale behavior and local users can configure their Server User Locale site settings as they wish (see instructions below).

You do not need to install Language Packs to configure Regional Settings. See the Language Settings section.

Server Site Locale

Site Administrators can change the default locale of a PWA site by navigating to the WSS Regional Settings page under Site Administration.
All users logging in for the first time will have their locale set to the default Server Site Locale.

For detailed information, see Site Regional Settings in Global features in Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010.

PWA does not support non-Gregorian calendars. If a non-Gregorian calendar is selected, a message will display when accessing PWA instructing the user to follow a link to change to a Gregorian calendar.

Server User Locale
- Local users can change their default regional settings by going to the PWA site and following the steps for User Regional Settings in Global features in Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010.
  
  The Server User Locale dialog is basically the same as the Server Site Locale dialog except it does not have a Sort Order field.

Formatting Behavior

Server

Dates, numbers and sort order
- The WSS Regional Settings locale is used to specify date, numbers and sort order.
- It is possible to have a locale not match the language selected. Dates will be rendered using the locale chosen, not the UI language. For example, if the UI language is Japanese, but the Locale is English, the date formats would be in English.
Do not confuse Locale with Language. Locale does not require any LPKs to be installed, whereas switching Languages in PWA does require at least one LPK to be installed.

Currency

To set the currency unit, the Administrator would need to navigate to Server Settings > Additional Server Settings.

Project Server ignores the locale’s currency unit but adheres to the currency format. For example, in Project Server, $50.00 in US Dollars will appear as $50,00 if the locale is set to German.
If you change the currency unit, all lists displaying monetary values created before the change will use the previous currency unit, and all lists displaying monetary valued created after the change will use the new currency unit.

It is important to note that you can force the currency to be the same for all projects. If you do that, any project created with a different currency previously will be forced to change the currency symbol the next time the project is saved to the server.

Client
- Not connected to PWA
  - Microsoft Project will take all of it formatting from the operating system (OS) regional settings.
- Connected to PWA

Date, time and number formatting
- Project opened in client
  - If a project is published to PWA but is opened in the Project client application, then all date, time and number formatting will conform to the OS regional settings.
  - For example, if your PWA locale is Arabic but your OS regional setting is set to Romanian, when the project is opened in the Project client application, it will display with Romanian formatting.
- Project opened in PWA
  - If a project is published to PWA and is opened in PWA, then all date, time and number formatting will conform to your user account settings in PWA.
  - For example, if a project is created in Microsoft Project using the Japanese-Japan locale, but Project Server was set to the English-U.S. locale, after the project is saved and published to PWA, all dates and number formats will be rendered to match the English-U.S. locale if the project is opened in PWA.
Currency
- If the server is set to force currency setting, then both server and client will follow the server setting.
- If the server is not set to force currency setting, then the currency will remain whatever it was originally set to.

Language Settings

The WSS Language Settings in Microsoft Project Server allows the Site Administrator to enable any LPKs installed. This section will explain how a user can interact with WSS and PWA pages if any LPKs are installed and what is the expected default behavior.

Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Office MOSS language SKU must be identical for installation to occur. In addition, LPKs can be installed before or after provisioning. If they are installed after provisioning, then the server must be provisioned again. There are two types of server LPKs available: WSS LPK which only contains WSS components, and MOSS LPK which contains both WSS and Project components.

Site Administrators can enable LPKs after they are installed by doing the following:

Drop down Site Actions menu.
Select Site Settings.
Select Language Settings (under Site Administration)
Check the checkboxes of all the alternate languages that should be enabled for PWA site users (see Language Settings dialog below)
To overwrite translations, select Yes to automatically apply changes to application content in the primary language to all alternate languages
Click OK

If alternate languages have been enabled as noted above, local users can change the default UI language by doing the following:

Drop down the User Name menu at the top of the page.
Select Display Language.
Select the preferred language for display (see below).

If you have more than one LPK installed, try changing your UI to the various languages. It’s a great cultural experience.

You should now be able to change the Regional and Language Settings for PWA and know what the expected behavior is. If you have any questions, let me know by leaving a comment below, and I will get back to you.

Yours truly,

The Professor

PS. A big thanks to Paul Suurs and Grace Sturman of the Office Global Experience Platform team, and Mike Joe of the Project team for their contribution on this article.