Hi Jan,
I have become totally dependent on the automatic spell checking in
Outlook 2007. I would die without it. The automatic language recognition
works fine for me with German and English.
In your situation, I think I know a way to help you. This btw applies to
Word & Outlook in an identical fashion, and also to some degree to the
other Office apps.
Office takes the queue in which language to write from Windows. In fact,
the Windows Input language determines which language to use. So if your
Windows input language is set to English, it will treat the text as
English. In Office, you can obviously manually override this by using
the set language feature on text you have already typed. In Word &
Outlook only, the language is automatically detected when you press
enter or end a sentence with a punctuation sign. This doesn't always
work perfect, but it works most of the time. Notice that automatic
language detection is not a feature of PPT, Excel, OneNote, etc.
With this knowledge, you can make your life easier by simply switching
the Windows input language to whatever language you want to type in.
Let's say you want to write in English, then you switch it to English.
If you want to write in French, you switch it to French, etc. You can
set the Windows Input language via Control Panel, Regional and Language
Options, Languages, Details. When you add a language there by default,
it comes with the matching keyboard layout. So if you add English, it
comes with the US-English keyboard layout which is rather annoying when
you have a German keyboard e.g. that can type English just fine without
having to switch keyboard layouts. But you can add languages using any
keyboard layout. So you can add US-English, but with a German keyboard
layout. That way, the language bar icon becomes a switcher of the input
language, but not of the keyboard layout. If you assign shortcut keys to
each of the languages you'd like to type in, you can easily decide which
language to use before you start writing an email and Outlook will by
default use that language to spell check it (if it has a spell checker
for that language installed of course). You are probably familiar with
the language bar, as you need to use it to write Russian.
Does that help you? And also, I am asking Microsoft about the language
indicator issue.
Actually, thinking about this...I was looking for a good example to
illustrate how to write a COM add-in that customizes the Outlook Ribbon.
Writing an add-in that adds the language indicator functionality to the
ribbon might be a good one.
Subscribe to my blog on my website, and you might have the language
indicator feature via an add-in back in your Outlook shortly.
Patrick Schmid
