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David Lee · May 20, 2007, 11:02 AM

I have a Japanese version of Office 2004 on several Macs, all set to run English as the primary language and Japanese as the second in the list. I want the application to use English as the default, but it won't. It is constantly shifting into Japanese at the worst times. Say I am writing in English on one file, then open another file that has no Japanese in it, and the application suddenly trips the mode into Japanese, enabling the Japanese input Method. If you keep on typing all you get is strange characters! So you waste a second because you have to switch back to English and that can make you lose concentration!
Running Panther, there was a system preference to disable keyboard/font switching that seemed to help, but that has disappeared in Tiger. I cannot find an appropriate preference in the Japanese preferences either. Any suggestions?

JKT · May 20, 2007, 02:14 PM

This doesn't just happen in Office on the Mac. This abysmal "feature" is also present in Word 2003 as well.

What you need to do is save your default template in Word with English as the default language. This will help for all new documents that you create, but will be useless for any that you receive.

David Lee · May 20, 2007, 02:40 PM

Thanks. However, while I do know how to open the "Normal" template I am not sure what you mean by "saving it with English as the default language." Is having English turned on sufficient? With nothing changed in the file it won't even be saved. Can you elaborate on that? And thanks for taking the time to answer.

OreoCookie · May 20, 2007, 02:51 PM

No, Office is definitely not international. When I was in Japan, I was disappointed to find out that some features of the Japanese version were not present in the German version of MS Office (namely those that are concerned with Japanese input). I'm not aware of any other OS X app that is crippled in this manner! Ugh.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese version couldn't handle English (or any other language for that matter) properly. If you need both languages, I would suggest you look at alternatives (from the top of my head: Nisus Writer Pro/Express, Mellel, the OpenOffice derivative NeoOffice, Apple's iWork).

Don't be fooled into believing that the Windows version is better: it is worse, because the system isn't based on unicode. If you install the Japanese version and open a harmless mp3 file with umlaute or accents in them, these special characters will be replaced by (seemingly random) kanji

(Not that that has ever happened to me, MacOS X no okage de

)

analogika · May 20, 2007, 05:53 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

No, Office is definitely not international. When I was in Japan, I was disappointed to find out that some features of the Japanese version were not present in the German version of MS Office (namely those that are concerned with Japanese input). I'm not aware of any other OS X app that is crippled in this manner! Ugh.

Adobe is, AFAIK, equally language-stupid.

And yes, **** Microsoft for this idiocy. It's been over six years with OS X's native multi-language support, and the single most widespread application used for recording written language doesn't support it.

voodoo · May 21, 2007, 02:47 PM

Originally Posted by analogika

Adobe is, AFAIK, equally language-stupid.

And yes, **** Microsoft for this idiocy. It's been over six years with OS X's native multi-language support, and the single most widespread application used for recording written language doesn't support it.

Adobe, Microsoft, potato, potahto.

V