I recently bought a new netbook and have installed a new version of word on it as the man in the shop said my ancient version wouldn't run on Windows 7. The default English in this new version is US English and I can't work out how to change it to UK English. (I can change it temporarily to UK English but it always reverts to US for a new document).

It also has google chrome as a navigator which has French as its default language spell checker. Is there anyway of disactivating this? I'm fed up with it underlining everything in red when I'm typing in English (like on the forums). I type roughly equally often in French and English so I'm not really sure that I want to replace French by English as I'll then have the same problem but in different places.

For Word it should be along the lines of:

TOOLS ==> OPTIONS ==> Spelling and Grammar ==> Dictionaries ==> then select English (UK)

EDIT: I put a screen print in here but it's not appeared....

I wonder why he would have told you that?

FWIW, I am running Office/Word 2003 on Windoze 7 x64 on my desktop, and on Windoze 7 32 bit on my laptop without any issues at all. Indeed, I would say that Word runs significantly better, faster and more reliably in 7 than it ever did on Windoze Xp.

The children are running later versions of Word on their machines, but I dislike the new interface. If it 'aint broke, don't fix it!

SB

In Word 2010 it's File/Options/Language. You can set UK English as the default and you can also add other languages for editing purposes.

I think you may also need to set the language options for any Word templates by opening the files concerned, (*.dot or *.dotx files), and setting their options from there.

SB

To make the changes permanent you need to find and open the template "normal.dot" (or "normal.dotx" according to your version), set the language to UK English and the save it. This is the root template on which all new documents are based.

If you change any options in Tools, Options, blah blah blah these should update the Global template - normal.dot or whatever. Unless MS have found another way to mess things up.

I did wonder that myself - they were selling the office pack very cheaply if you bought it at the same time as the netbook, which was why I decided to buy it there and then rather than attempting to install my old version first. And it is a very old version, 1997 (I think - before 2003 anyway). I suppose the other advantage is that I can actually now open the documents my university sends me without having to convert them to pdf first.



Thanks, I'll try this. Just going into "file" and "options" only seems to get it to apply to the document I'm currently using.

I have Word 2000 on this machine.... but Word 2007 on the other but I tend to use the forum from the first machine....

To be fair, Office 1997 was not one of Micro$oft's finest programmes. To say that it had a tendency to 'blue screen' would be an understatement.

Office 2000 was much better, whilst 2003 was better still.

SB