I have inherited a set of documents that have come from who knows where; maybe upgrades from Word 6, for all I know. They all have the language setting on Normal style to be (Asian) Korean. This is a Windows 7 computer running Office 2010, though I had the same problem when it was Windows XP running Office 2007 (but the problem was not my direct responsibility then).
New documents created on my computer do not have the Language set this way, so it's not my computer. I have looked at the language properties for Windows, for Office, and for Word, and on none of them is Korean even an option. The language is not installed or enabled on my computer. (I tried changing the language from English to English anyway, just to be sure. It had no effect.)
I tried setting the language at a paragraph level using the Review > Language > Proofing option. I select English, but it has no effect on the paragraph. I also tried Control-A and just setting everything in the document but that had no effect.
I tried set the language at a style level using the Modify command in the Styles pane; no effect. The language of the style stays (Asian) Korean. (And if I can't change it, I can't use the Save Style as Current Paragraph option.)
I tried to reset the language with VBA by directly setting LanguageID in both an affected paragraph and in the style. No effect. The language of the style stays (Asian) Korean.
I suspect that the only reason the paragraphs are even readable is because the language isn't installed, and the software defaults to the existing language.
How do I remove a language that isn't installed? How do I clear it from the Normal style (which is special anyway)?
I do not have administrator privileges on this machine, so if the answer requires a change to the registry, I will have to have someone else do it.
EDIT: Documents are old, so this is in Compatibility mode, which might be significant. And I just noticed that the date might cause some people to think this isn't a real problem, but it is.
A different macro by someone better than I am did change the language of the style, but now I have lingering (Asian) hanging around. I can certainly understand that would be there if I had a multiple language computer, but I don't. So I guess part of this has to be, how do I make it stop showing that information? How do I make it think that it's all monolingual (or at least, all Latin alphabets)?
Thanks.
John
