Having upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 the spell checker in Outlook Express changed from English to French. The spell checker in the other Office applications is alright, but I cannot change the Outlook Express spell checker back to English. Can you help?

This is a known problem which many other users have experienced as a result of installing Microsoft Office 2007. This issue has been recognised by Microsoft and is detailed in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article: support.microsoft.com/kb/932974 . The upshot of this article is that Microsoft Office 2007 installs brand new spell checker files to support Microsoft Office 2007. Outlook Express does not have its own in-built spell checker function but instead uses the Office spell checker. This is why if you do not have Office installed on the computer you will find that there is no spell checker in Outlook Express. Unfortunately, these spell checker files are incompatible with Outlook Express 6.0 (the version of Outlook Express that ships with Windows XP). The fact that your Outlook Express spell checker has now defaulted to French is a side effect of the new Office 2007 spell checker files being incompatible with Outlook Express 6. At the time of writing Microsoft do not offer a solution for this problem, and it seems unlikely that they will release an update to address this issue. However, there are a few workarounds we can implement to resolve this problem.

First, you can update to Windows Live Mail. This new product is designed to be the successor to Outlook Express on Windows XP and Windows Mail on Windows Vista. This is freely downloadable from the Microsoft website at download.live.com/wlmail . Additionally, Windows Live Mail supports the Office 2007 spell checker, so this will regain the functionality that you require. For more information on Windows Live Mail, and how this differs from Outlook Express, there is a good article on the Windows Help website at tinyurl.com/29wo6a .

Should you not want to upgrade to Windows Live Mail the other option available to get a spell checker working in Outlook Express 6, is to download and install a third-party spell checking utility. There are several such utilities available for free download off the internet, such as Spell Checker for OE (www.snapfiles.com/get/spelloe.html). Be aware, I have not used any of these third-party spell checkers and thus cannot provide any specific recommendations. However, I suggest that you have a look around and find a solution which meets your needs (and the previous link may provide a good starting point). There should be plenty of free spell checkers available, so unless there is a compelling reason to purchase a commercial spell checker you should be able to suffice with a free option.

Alternatively, if you want to remove your dependency on Office and Outlook Express for spell checking of emails then you may wish to consider changing your email client. Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent alternative email client which provides most of the same features as Outlook Express, but also adds additional functionality and customisability. Additionally, Thunderbird has its own in-built spell checker and is not reliant on Office (or any other external applications) to provide the spell checking function. Furthermore, you can also download localised dictionaries for particular languages and localities from the Mozilla website: www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/dictionaries.html . If you are interested in trying Mozilla Thunderbird, this free, open-source software application can be downloaded from www.mozilla.com/thunderbird . When you first launch Thunderbird you should be prompted to import your emails, settings, and address book from Outlook Express. If you want this to occur follow the import wizard. From this point onwards you should not use Outlook Express anymore, as you need a “clean break” between Outlook Express and Thunderbird to ensure that you don’t get some email downloaded into Outlook Express and other email downloaded into Thunderbird, with neither having a complete set of all your email. Once you have imported your Outlook Express email into Thunderbird you should be ready to go. The interface of Thunderbird is similar enough to Outlook Express that you should intuitively be able to use this new email client without much hassle.