Microsoft Office 2000 (Word 2000, Excel 2000, FrontPage® 2000, Outlook® 2000, Access 2000, and PowerPoint® 2000) has a number of built-in multilingual capabilities that make it easier than ever to work with different languages. Before you can take advantage of these capabilities for any language, though, you must first do what is known as enabling the language for editing.

What does enabling a language for editing do?

Enabling a language for editing turns on Office features specific to the language, and optimizes each Office program for the language.

For example, if you want to work with Japanese text, you enable editing for Japanese. Doing so makes important options — such as the use of Japanese text compression and the document grid — available in Word and other Office programs.

Enabling a language for editing also facilitates automatic language detection in Word 2000. When automatic language detection is turned on, Word applies the appropriate spelling and grammar dictionaries, punctuation rules, and sorting conventions for that language as you type in it.

For best results, enable only the languages you know you want to work with

As you work with Office programs, it's best not to enable multiple languages simply for the sake of it. Instead, you should enable only the languages you know you want to work with because:

• Enabling more languages than you need may slow down your system.
• Automatic language detection will work more efficiently in Word if only the necessary languages are enabled.
• If you enable many different languages, your Office programs may become cluttered with language-specific commands and options that you don't use.

How to enable a language for editing

Enabling a language is a simple step that you take by using the Microsoft Office Language Settings tool, which is installed with Office 2000.

To enable a language for editing

1. On the taskbar, click the Start button, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Office Language Settings.
2. On the Enabled Languages tab, select the check boxes next to the languages you want.

After the language is enabled, you can explore the features and options that are now available for it in Office. For example, after enabling Japanese, the Asian Typography tab becomes available in Word (Format menu, Paragraph command). There you can set numerous preferences specific to Japanese and other East Asian text.

More information

For more information about enabling a language for editing, type enable language in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab in the Help window of your Office program, and then click Search.