Change menu languages in Office 2004 for Mac?

November 30, 2006 6:43 PM

I'm using a friend's Mac, and I need to use Office, but he is Dutch and all his Office 2004 menus are in Dutch. How do I switch to English? m.i.
posted by PenguinBukkake to computers & internet (10 comments total)

I tried to babelfish some menu names and use this page but it didn't work: still Dutch. Thanks for your help!
posted by PenguinBukkake at 6:44 PM on November 30, 2006

You shouldn't have to do anything special with Office itself.

Go to System Preferences ("Systeemvoorkeuren"), choose the International section ("Landintellingen", with the icon of the flag), and drag English to the top of the list. Quit and restart Office, and it should show up in English.
posted by xil at 6:47 PM on November 30, 2006

Excuse me, "Landinstellingen", that is.
posted by xil at 6:48 PM on November 30, 2006

everything's in English now but Office
posted by PenguinBukkake at 6:57 PM on November 30, 2006

!
posted by PenguinBukkake at 6:57 PM on November 30, 2006

I don't think you can do it... had a similar problem with Office 2003 where everything was displayed in japanese. Only choice was to reinstall office with english support.

Not sure if it's the same for Office 2004 on a mac, but for Office 2003 you need to have a Multilingual User Interface pack version
posted by logicpunk at 7:06 PM on November 30, 2006

Well, that's pretty lame; looks like Office still doesn't implement localization correctly (as one of their developers freely admits).
posted by xil at 7:18 PM on November 30, 2006

You can't. It's a Dutch version of Office. If you want English, you need to install an English version. Easiest solution would be to download OpenOffice and open your word documents in there.
posted by easternblot at 7:40 PM on November 30, 2006

Or you could learn to live without the menus. [.doc]
that is the result of a Word macro called ListCommands. To create your own, hit alt-f8, check the dropdown, (alt-a), for Word commands and then type lis to jump to the ListCommands macro. It should help you with just about everything you'd like to do.

Alternately, short of downloading OpenOffice you might take a look at Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
posted by geekyguy at 8:42 PM on November 30, 2006

:(

thanks everybody
posted by PenguinBukkake at 1:35 AM on December 1, 2006