XL7: Multilanguage Support in Microsoft Excel

• Microsoft Excel for Windows 95, version 7.0

SYMPTOMS

When you use the multilanguage support feature in Microsoft Windows 95, the following symptoms occur in Microsoft Excel:

• When you change the language in Windows using the Language indicator on the Windows taskbar, the characters that you enter in Microsoft Excel appear as extended ANSI characters instead of the characters for the selected language. The font in Microsoft Excel does not change to the expected font for the language setting.
• When you format a cell on your worksheet for a different language font, such as Arial Greek, if you apply font formatting to the cell, such as Bold, the characters appear as the extended ANSI characters instead of the Greek characters, although the Font box continues to display the applied font, such as Arial Greek.
• If you set the Standard font in Microsoft Excel to a different language font, such as Arial Greek, and you change the language in Windows to this same language (Greek), the characters that you type on your worksheet appear as extended ANSI characters instead of as the characters for the language setting.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs because multilingual support is not fully implemented in Microsoft Excel.

When you install the Windows Multilanguage Support feature, you can create documents in Bulgarian, Belarusian, Czech Republic, Hungarian, Greek, Polish, Russian, and Sloverian. TrueType fonts are installed for these languages: namely Arial CE, Arial Cyr, Arial Greek, Courier New CE, Courier New Cyr, Courier New Greek, Times New Roman CE, Times New Roman Cyr, Times New Roman Greek. To actually type these characters, you can also install the keyboard language and layout for these languages.

When you install Multilanguage Support and install the keyboard language and layout for a given language, some of the Windows applications, for example Word for Windows, automatically change to the corresponding font for that language. For example, if you are using the font Arial in Word for Windows, and you switch to the Greek keyboard language and layout, the font changes to Arial Greek, and the characters you type in your document are displayed as Greek characters. However, in Microsoft Excel, when you change the keyboard language and layout setting, the keyboard layout changes (different characters appear when you type) but the font does not change to the font for that language setting.

WORKAROUNDS

To work around these issues and display the appropriate language characters in Microsoft Excel, apply the appropriate language font, such as Arial Greek, to the cells that are displaying the extended ANSI characters. Even if the Font box already displays this font, you may need to apply the font again to change the characters that are displayed.

Note that to work around the issue of the characters being changed when you apply font formatting, such as Bold, you can also use the Font tab in the Format Cells dialog box instead of the buttons on the Formatting toolbar to format the characters.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

REFERENCES

For more information about how to create a multilingual document in Microsoft Windows, click the Index tab in Windows Help, type the following text

   multilingual