Word's language settings (was: A couple of strange ones?)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

In response to my suggestion that the original poster change the 
language of the text _in the style definitions_, Karen E. Black 
suggested: <<Select all text in the document, click Tools > Language > 
Set Language..., and select the language you want to use. It usually 
works for me.>>

The key word here is "usually". I used to do this as a quick fix, but 
found that it fails often enough to be unreliable, and I've largely 
stopped doing it. The problem is twofold. First, if the document has 
been set to automatically update styles, then the next time you open it 
the language settings will all be changed back to the original 
settings, and the spellcheck problems will reoccur. (For that matter, 
if you don't want to update the styles--which is often useful but not 
here--you should make sure this checkbox hasn't been selected: open the 
Tools menu, select Templates and Add-ins, and make sure that 
"automatically update" isn't selected.)

Second and more serious, Word makes the reasonable assumption that if 
you override a paragraph style definition (e.g., to change a font or a 
language definition midway through a paragraph), you intended to do 
this, and thus, it won't automatically override this choice. So if (for 
example) you selected all your Latin words inside a paragraph and 
defined them using the Latin dictionary, the "select all" approach 
won't change the dictionary used to spellcheck these words--or at least 
it generally won't; for reasons that escape me, it sometimes does. You 
can force Word to remove these manual settings by selecting the entire 
paragraph and pressing Control-Spacebar, which translates to "remove 
all formatting not specified by the surrounding style"--but then you 
lose bold, italics, etc. Not fun.

That's the long way of saying that the better solution is to always 
redefine the language via the styles, not via the shortcut. Word's 
styles are sufficiently powerful and useful that it's worth learning 
how to work with them rather than against them. (Plus, as a bonus, it's 
good training for some future day when you'll learn Framemaker or XML 
or SGML.)

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)