Word changed language to Spanish

[Orrie]

Hi,

I was writing a document in Word 2003 in U.S. English, and typed the name of
a place in Spain on the first line. The text included a colon ) and a
hyphen (-). Everything seemed normal. (The line did not use any uniquely
Spanish characters, such as accents, tildes or inverted "!" or "?" symbols.)

To my surprise, when I typed the next line, standard English character
keystrokes produced Spanish characters. The hyphen key (-) produced a curved
apostrophe ('), like a single open-quote mark, and pressing the key again
produced a single close-quote mark. The "=" key produced a Spanish inverted
exclamation point, and the "+" produced an inverted question mark. The colon
) key produced a capital N with a tilde.

I have no idea how this change took place. I checked Tools/Language and the
highlighted language was English (US). Also "Detect language automatically"
was not checked before or after this odd behavior began. I clicked on
Default to make sure English (US) was set as the default language of my
Normal template. However, Word still types Spanish characters when I type
English symbol keys.

What's going on? How can get Word back to the English keyoard? And how can I
prevent this unwanted language switch in the future? If I need to create a
new Normal template to do this, how do I do that?

Thank you.

Orrie

 

[Graham Mayor]

It seems that you have inadvertently activated an alternative keyboard
layout - check Windows > control panel > regional and language options >
languages > details.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Orrie]

Thank you, Graham.



The language switch happened late in the evening, so after I wrote to this
newsgroup, I tried once more to reset the Tools/Language default to U.S.
English, then I shut down Word and Windows once more and went to bed. Today,
Word seems to be behaving normally using the Normal template – in U.S.
English.



Apparently, this was either a temporary Word template problem or a Windows
problem that fixed itself just by restarting the computer a second time
after resetting the Tools/Language default preference.



Odd, but it worked.



Orrie