Changing Languages in Office 2016

mahughe
Contributor

We've had a request to have the Burmese language set in Office 2016..I've found this solution below but not sure of what the actual file name would be to change it too. If there is another solution I'm open to that as well. Thanks,

You can do this in a much less intrusive way by opening the Terminal and entering:
defaults write com.microsoft.Excel AppleLanguages '("pt-BR")'
defaults write com.microsoft.Word AppleLanguages '("pt-BR")'
defaults write com.microsoft.Powerpoint AppleLanguages '("pt-BR")'
Change pt-BR for the wanted language.
With this, you get the app translated and also spell check working.

2 REPLIES 2

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

@mahughe, these are Terminal commands that set the language for each app. Office 2016 for Mac is localized into about 27 different languages for use when the macOS system language is set to one of them. The commands you posted will set the Office apps to display their menus, dialogs and other settings in Portuguese.

While an Office application is quit, you can change the language it displays using a two-letter code below:

ar = Arabic
cs = Czech
da = Danish
de = German
el = Greek
en = English (US)
es = Spanish
fi = Finnish
fr = French
he = Hebrew
hu = Hungarian
id = Indonesian
it = Italian
ja = Japanese
ko = Korean
nl = Netherlands
no = Norwegian
pl = Polish
pt_PT = Portuguese
pt = Portuguese Brazil
ru = Russian
sk = Slovak
sv = Swedish
th = Thai
tr = Turkish
zh_CN = Chinese Simplified
zh_TW = Chinese Taiwan

Run one or more of the following commands in Terminal. This example will set them to Japanese:

defaults write com.microsoft.Excel AppleLanguages '("JA")'
defaults write com.microsoft.Powerpoint AppleLanguages '("JA")'
defaults write com.microsoft.Word AppleLanguages '("JA")'

What you're probably look for, though, is proofing language. You don't need to change the application's language to change languages for proofing. In Microsoft Word choose Tools menu > Set Proofing Language.

Unfortunately, Burmese is not an option for either of these language features with Office 2016 for Mac.

janderson1
New Contributor

Hi - I've tried this on an older MAC (2015) MODEL, but 2017 and above models this doesn't work. Any ideas why this would be?