Change the language of fields in Microsoft Word

Question

I am using Word 2010 and some built-in features with fields, such as bibliography.

My Word installation is English and I am writing a report in US English. However, my computer has its locale set to Denmark. This affects the formatting of dates and some of the text in the auto-generated fields (e.g. in bibliography it says "citeret:" instead of "cited:").

How can I change the language of the fields to US English?

Thanks,

Martin

Solution 1

Right-click the field and select "Change field..." (or whatever the item is called in your language of Word).

In my case, the field is BIBLIOGRAPHY \l 1053. 1053 is the Microsoft Locale ID (LCID) for Sweden. I just changed it to BIBLIOGRAPHY \l 2057, where 2057 is the LCID for English - United Kingdom.

Then the bibliography changed language, so there is no more "Fifth upplagan" instead of "Fifth edition"!

Reference:

• Locale IDs Assigned by Microsoft

Solution 2

You can also just delete the language code in the field, then the bibliography will update with the language of the rest of the document

Solution 3

If you wanna change the language of the date field (as Bogdan0x400 wanted to do) here's the thing (word 2013):

Don't use a general "field" (and then data category)!

Go to Insert → text → date and time.

In the popup window you can choose the language on the right. Don't forget to check 'automatic actualisation' on bottom right. This actually also changes the general "field" language.

date and time window

Please note that the names might not be 100% correct as I was just translating the names from a german version of word 2013.

hope that helps.

Cheers, Raffa

Solution 4

Select the whole field and define spell checking language (Tab Review -> Group Language -> Language splitbox). Then press update field.

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Comments

[Andreas Rejbrand]

+1. I have just written a very long English-language article in Word 2010, and I am pretty annoyed over the fact the automatic bibliography says "5 uppl." ("uppl." [upplaga] is Swedish for "ed." [edition]).

[Bogdan0x400]

I have a date field (DATE \@ "d MMMM yyyy") . I've tried adding \l 2057 to it, but Word doesn't save the LCID value. It also says that \l is to insert the date in last format of the insert tab, in other words, it doesn't change the language. Do you know how to force the DATE field to be in English? I have MS Word 2010 and a .doc file.

[DavidPostill]

This is not an answer to the original question. If you have a new question please ask your own question (referencing this one for context if it helps).

[Burst]

I've got English UI in Windows and in MS Office applications. But I prepare a document in Word in Russian. I tried to 1. Create a field via Ctrl+F9 2. In the new field I've entered "=235555 *CardText \l 1049" 3. Pressed Alt+F9 to show the field values. Got " !Syntax Error, L" What is wrong in the formula? I cannot find any clear official description of this approach.