This is a good one. And apparently it’s pretty damned common too.

I installed Office 2007 recently, and all of a sudden Microsoft seems to think that I want to send Email in French.

At first I was a little puzzled as I read the first sentence in my email (post-spell check). Why on earth would Outlook suggest I say something like “Wyat iso gong on hère”? Now, I can’t be sure — a French speaker could help me better — but I think Outlook just changed my fairly standard “let’s do lunch” email into some statement about me taking a young stag to court (see below, you be the judge).

At least it left my name alone!

Clicking around a bit in Outlook Express, and eventually looking into the spell checking menu, I found that the only drop down for Language dictionaries was “French (France)”. Nice.

Microsoft are indeed aware of a problem where, upon installing Office 2007, Outlook Express “forgets” how to spell check in English (and Spanish, and German).

Apparently, this has to do with the fact that Outlook, the little leach of a program it is, using Microsoft Word for all of it’s word processing. That includes spell check. When Microsoft updated the spell check modules for English, Spanish and German, well, they didn’t bother to make sure poor little Outlook Express could read any of these dictionaries.

How to Fix It?

There are a few options:

1. If you still have the old Microsoft Office CDs (as in you upgraded from a previous version) , you can go back and install just the spell checking features from the old Microsoft Office suite. Outlook Express should pick those up and it’ll be able to understand English.
2. You can download a third party spell checking plugin such as Spell Checker for OE.
3. Upgrade to (and pay for) Outlook 2007

That’s about it. I’m going for the second of three. Let me know how your’s works out.
-PL

Popularity: 27% [?]