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.