Excel hell

October 1, 2010 7:47 AM

Excel 2007 filter: How do you change the dictionary language for specific cells/columns/rows?

It seems like the language can only be changed for the entire file, but in Excel 2003 it was possible to specify different languages within parts of a single file. Can it be done in Excel 2007?

posted by bethist to technology (3 answers total)

What are you trying to do? If you're doing something with names, for example, it may just be easier to cut and paste the accents or tildes from Word, but that may be a clunky solution.
posted by Madamina at 7:50 AM on October 1, 2010

My brother works as a translator and often has multiple languages in one file, for example, in different rows. He used to be able to select a row and change the language for that row in Excel 2003 in order to spell check the spreadsheet. But he can't find the language options for this in Excel 2007. All he can find is the "default language" option that changes the whole spreadsheet.
posted by bethist at 8:03 AM on October 1, 2010

I've had this problem. I couldn't solve it in Excel, but I used a workaround: copy-paste the entire row into Word, spell-check from in there, and then copy-paste back into Excel where I got it from. Made me super crazy. Why didn't they keep this functionality?!? The world, and business, is getting more multilingual, not less.
posted by juniperesque at 8:43 AM on October 1, 2010