The Microsoft Word spell checker keeps reverting to English (US) even though I have manually set the language as English (Australia). How can I permanently change the language and spell check to English (Australia)? The computer is running Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office 2000.

First, you need to ensure that the language in Windows has been set correctly because often Word will detect the default Windows language and then attempt to use that language. Go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and open the “Regional and Language Options” control panel (you may need to first open the Date, Time, Language and Regional Options category if the control panel is being displayed in category view). Once the Regional and Language Options control panel has been opened, go through each of the tabs and ensure that the language and locale has been set to English (Australia). In particular, make sure that the default language on the “Language” tab is English (Australia) and that English (US) is either a secondary (non-default) language or has been removed all-together, as there should be no harm in removing the English (US) language so long as English (Australia) has been installed and is set as the default. If you need to keep English (US) installed rather than removing it completely, you will likely notice the language toolbar appears in the Windows taskbar, near the clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. This appears because multiple languages have been installed on the computer and provides you with a method of switching between the languages. Make sure that English (Australia) is the active (selected) language when you are using Word.

Should the problem still continue after ensuring that the Windows language settings are correct we will now check the Word language settings. By way of background, languages can be set on an individual basis for documents and also within parts of documents. For example, if you open a document which has been written in French then the language setting for that document would be French and the relevant proofing tools (such as spell-check, etc.) would be set to use the French language. Likewise, if the document was written in English (US) then the proofing tools for this language would also be used. Furthermore, Word can assign different languages to different portions of one document allowing you to write parts of a document in different languages. For example, part of a document could be written in French and another part written in German. In this case, assuming that the French part has been set to the French language and the German part has been set to the German language, the correct proofing languages will be used.

This is important to understand because most users believe that the language setting in Word is a global setting and that setting the language to English (Australia) will result in all documents being proofed using an Australian dictionary. However, this is not the case as the language is defined within each document. The reason that most people do not see this fact is because their language is automatically set to English (Australia) when Word has been installed (as it detects the language configured in Windows) and then you write all of your documents using the English (Australia) language. Issues only arise when you may receive a document written in English (US) and wonder why the spell checker is not detecting words such as “color” instead of “colour”.

In your situation, it seems that the documents have been written in the English (US) language and therefore Word is detecting that language and using the proofing-tools for the US dictionary. There are a few ways we can work around this issue. First, we can stop Word from trying to automatically detect the language used in the document. This means that we can set the English (Australia) dictionary to be used within Word and this will be used, regardless of the language used to actually write the document. Open Word and go to the “Tools” menu > “Language” > “Set Language”. In the Language window that appears, make sure that “English (Australia)” has been selected as the active language. Then untick “Detect language automatically” to stop Word trying to automatically detect the language of the document. Click OK to save and close.

While this should fix the problem, it is not the best solution as should you receive a document written in another language (such as from a US-based source) then because the English (Australia) dictionary is being forced upon that document, even though it was legitimately written in English (US), you will see the spell-checker detect a lot of errors. Therefore, a better solution would be for Word to continue to automatically detect the language of documents and you manually change the language of your documents which were written using the wrong language. From the description of the problem you have provided, it seems that the documents which you have been writing were composed using English (US). This means that whenever the documents are opened they are subject to the English (US) dictionary for proofing. In order to change the document to another language, select all of the text within the document (using CTRL-A) and then go to the “Tools” menu > “Language” > “Set Language” and select “English (Australia)” then click OK. This will change the language for the selected parts of the document (in this case, the entire document) to English (Australia).

As we previously discussed, different parts of the document can also be composed in different languages. For the purpose of this answer I am assuming that you wish for the entirety of each document on your computer to be set to English (Australia). However, if you had a document which, for example, had a portion of US English text (perhaps a quote) included then you could specifically select all text except that quote and set that selected text to English (Australia). Then, you would go back and select the US English quote and set that portion of the document to English (US). This means that the proofing tools (particularly, the spell checker) would understand the different spelling of particular words between the Australian English and US English portions of the document.

As a final point, you may wish to consider upgrading Office at some point. Office 2000 has been superseded several times, most recently with the release of Office 2010. There are plenty of new features in these more recent versions of Office, so they may be well worth investigating to see whether they could be useful for your purposes.