What’s New in Office 2000 Installation

Microsoft Office 2000 combines support for all languages in a single product. Previously, international organizations had to install a separate version of Office in each country. When you use Office 2000, you can now deploy Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack around the world and use plug-in language features to run applications in local languages.

Installing a single version of Office across your multinational organization simplifies the tasks of deploying, administering, and supporting Office. This design also benefits users by letting them choose a familiar language when they create documents, view online Help, or work with the user interface.

Administering one multilingual installation

Installations of Office 2000 look and behave alike, no matter where they are installed. Anyone, anywhere in your international organization can open, display, edit, or print documents created by anyone else in the organization, provided the operating system supports display and input of the language.

For example, you can standardize your organization on English as the user interface language. If some users need to edit text in Japanese, however, the user interface can provide tools for Asian text layout. Users can also view online Help in their own language, even if the user interface is displayed in English to match the product documentation.

A single multilingual installation of Office 2000 offers new flexibility to users who travel or who work in more than one language:

• Users who travel to an office in another country can run Office in their own language.
• Multilingual users or users who share a computer with someone who speaks a different language can switch the user interface or online Help language.

Customizing for local environments

You can customize Office at deployment by specifying languages for the Office user interface, online Help, and editing tools. Language-specific features in Office 2000 are available according to the languages that you specify during installation or that users specify after installation.

In addition to specifying languages in Office, you must also install the Microsoft Office 2000 MultiLanguage Pack. The MultiLanguage Pack contains the files necessary to run the Office user interface and online Help in a number of languages. It also includes tools, such as spelling and grammar checkers, for many languages.

The MultiLanguage Pack has a Setup program separate from Office, and the installation can be customized to meet the needs of different international users.

Localized versions of Office 2000 are still available

Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack is an international core on top of which you can run language features from the MultiLanguage Pack. However, the MultiLanguage Pack does not include plug-in language features for all languages — for example, Excel add-ins are supported only in English.

If your users need to run completely localized software, you can deploy localized versions of Office 2000 and still have the advantage of a shared file format. Users can share documents seamlessly between the localized versions and Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack.

See also

If your organization is international, you can to take advantage of the international features of Office 2000. For more information, see Overview of International Features in Office 2000.

It is easy to deploy Office to international groups of users. To learn how, see Deploying Office in a Multinational Setting.