Word: "Formatted: French (France)"?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Nancy Allison wondered: <<OK, what have I done now? I am dutifully  
pegging away at updating a Word document, one I have worked in a  
zillion times before. I've turned on change tracking, and I'm  
displaying the changes in balloons in the margins. I notice that some  
of my newly-entered text is marked by a balloon stating "Formatted:  
French (France)">>

Somehow, you've changed the language of the text. It's not clear how,  
since doing so usually takes a trip two levels deep into Word's menu  
system (Tools-->Language, then select a new language), or similar  
editing of the paragraph or character styles. I'm not aware of any  
top-secret keystroke created by the International French Conspiracy  
to Trick Americans (R) <g>, so I'm not sure how to avoid the problem  
in future.

Oh, wait... I did think of one unlikely but theoretically conceivable  
possibility. Check your Keyboard control panel, though depending on  
which version of Windows you're using, it may be located somewhere  
else. There's a useless-for-most-people feature that lets you switch  
between keyboard layouts (e.g., U.S. English vs. International vs.  
French) if you press a certain keystroke. That keystroke is something  
like Alt plus the left Shift key by default, thus easy to  
inadvertently trigger. If so, disable this keystroke and reset the  
control panel to your original keyboard layout.

Fixing the language change should be relatively easy. First, check  
the style definitions to see whether you inadvertently edited one of  
them. If so, turn off revision tracking, edit the affected style so  
the language properties change back to the desired language. Because  
of how Word updates formatted paragraphs, it's wise to add a second  
step: with revision tracking off, select all (Control+A), then Tools-- 
 >Language-->select the correct language. Then turn on revision  
tracking and pick up where you left off.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
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