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Locking MS Word Language Default to EN-AUS

Can anyone remove the MS Word default language “virus” for us.

We want all of our Word document to absolutely and only use EN-AUS (English Australian) as the spell checker. When documents come in with other spell checkers, we want these stripped out and again only use EN-AUS.

The problem is the introduction of US English as a default spell-check and proofing tool. It comes in via changes to normal.dot, via documents from the outside being sent in EN-US and various other routes. Our EN-AUS then gets bumped or worse a document has mixes of EN-US and EN-AUS as you scroll through.
Is this possible? Can we lock out all other spell check dictionaries? If so, how!

Thanks

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Paul Sauvé

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Eric Fletcher

The drawback of changing an entire document to a different language (as above) is that you will then lose any deliberately-set language attributes. This can include any "no spellcheck" setting applied to, say, Latin terms, but also any foreign text set with the correct language. I frequently have French (Canada) set for words and phrases in bilingual content -- and as with your EN-AU problem, I want my English to be Canadian.

The method I prefer is to use Find and Replace to change all instances of English (US) to English (Canada). If you set this up as a Macro, it is easy to implement on a new document -- or on copy being pasted in from a different docuemnt.

GrahamSkan

There isn't a silver bullet for this question.

You might be able to set use an Office policy to force users to keep their local templates set to the chosen language. I am not an administrator but I would start here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924617

You could change the language for templates on your server, but all the on-line templates from Microsoft are set to US English.

Here is some macro code to change the language setting when a document is opened or created, as Eric Fletcher suggests

Sub AutoNew()
    ChangeLangID
End Sub

Sub AutoOpen()
    ChangeLangID
End Sub

Sub ChangeLangID()
    With ActiveDocument.Range.Find
        .LanguageID = wdEnglishUS
        .Replacement.LanguageID = wdEnglishAUS
        .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    End With
End Sub

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