How do I change the spelling in Microsoft Word 2000 to an Australian dictionary? I have been able to change the spelling in the current document to Australian, but it always defaults back to American after starting a new document.

As you have found when changing the language in a Word document, this doesn’t automatically apply that language to the entire content of the document. Instead, languages are applied to individual (or sections of) words within the document. Simply setting the language as English (Australia) by going to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Language’ > ‘Set Language’ will not apply the Australian language (i.e. use the spell-checker with Australian English) to the Word document. Instead, you must select the word, or a group of words (e.g. a paragraph), to which you wish to apply English (Australian), and then set the language using the ‘Set Language’ feature. Most of the time you will want to set the entire document to one language, in which case you would select all the text in the document and set the desired language. However, on some occasions you may wish to have multiple languages within a document (e.g. you may have a predominantly English document which has a few quotes which are in French). In this situation, you can have different languages set for different parts of the document. This is why Word has been designed to handle languages in this way.

Now we know the background of how Word assigns languages to documents, the question you have raised is how to set one particular language as default, so all new documents will by default use that language, e.g. English (Australia). To set the default language, go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Languages’ > ‘Set Language’ and select ‘English (Australia)’. Click the ‘Default’¦’ button (and click ‘Yes’ in the confirmation box) and then click OK. From now onwards, all new documents you create will use the English (Australia) language by default.