Change the proofing language in onenote permanently

Dear Peter,

Welcome to the forum here.

From the screenshot, it seems that you want to set the default language to English in the Language and Region setting in the My Account setting after you log into portal.office.com with your work or school account.

If yes, the settings may be applied to the Office for the web applications not the Office desktop clients. May I know whether you want to change the language of OneNote for the web in your environment?

If yes, may I know whether you change all the following settings to English? If yes, the changes may need some time to take effect. I suggest you wait some time, log out of the account and then re-log into portal.office.com with your account to check the result.

May I know whether the issue only happens in OneNote for the web in your environment?

If you want to change the language of OneNote 2016 which is part of the Microsoft 365 desktop clients, you may install  Language Accessory Pack for Office if there is no English pack and follow the steps in the article to set the language.

Thanks for your effort and time!

Sincerely,

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator

Hi,

I want to change the proofing language using Onenote desktop app (Version 16001.12026.20112.0) for a whole notebook permanently.

Currently every word I type is treated as German, where as I want to switch to English for a whole notebook.

I can set it to English, but the next words I type are again treated as German.

How can I change it permanently for a whole notebook?

The primary source for setting the proofing language in OneNote is the keyboard language setting in Windows.

Bernd

Hi Bernd, if I change the keyboard language to english, the keys will be different on my keyboard. the letter Z ,Y and @ will be at a different key, sinc eI ahve a German Keyboard. But it should be possible to tell onenote to use English a a proofing language for the complete notebook instead of word per word. One Word or Powerpoint you can do that, why not on onenote?

It's all about history 😉

OneNote development was never part of the Office development, eyed jealously.

Bernd

We need to have this fixed. The history of OneNote is not my concern. This bug hinders me to work effectively and it is terribly annoying. This has been consistently flagged by users for many years now (the oldest I found is from 2016).

MSFT please get this fixed.

Hi Peter,

the keys do not necessarily have to be different. This may seem counter-intuitive, but you CAN add a German keyboard layout to English language. It seems that I have the same case - I have two languages installed (English and Polish) in Windows and I always want to use Polish diacritics (e.g. ś instead of sending an email) so I added Polish (Programmers) keyboard to English language and removed the default English (US) keyboard.

Here's how my language bar looks like:

I hope this helps!

Patryk

This used to work, but not since the upgrade to windows 11. Most annoying!

I agree, this really really needs to be fixed! I have tried everything, but for every single text box I need to change the proofing language manually. I would also be happy if I could just turn the proofing off, as when I present my answers in class, it is most annoying to have red lines underneath every single word!

Dear All,

Sorry for the inconvenience the issue caused in your environments.

I suggest you use the built-in Feedback option to report the issue to our related team so that they can be aware of the behavior for further investigation.

Thanks for your effort and time!

Sincerely,

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator