Autoformat of special characters in French

[pants]

Hi, often when I'm typing in French, after a few pages of work, Word will
start autoformatting my special characters in a weird way. For instance, I'll
type: "d'une" and Word will change it to "dúne", which is not even an accent
that occurs in French. I can't find any way to turn this feature off, and it
only starts happening after I've been typing for two or three pages. Any
ideas? Thanks!

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?cGFudHM=?=,

often when I'm typing in French, after a few pages of work, Word will
start autoformatting my special characters in a weird way. For instance, I'll
type: "d'une" and Word will change it to "dúne", which is not even an accent
that occurs in French. I can't find any way to turn this feature off, and it
only starts happening after I've been typing for two or three pages. Any
ideas?

My newsreader doesn't like the Unicode MS uses on its web interface, so I'm not
sure to what Word is changing these words, but...

As a best guess:

1. You have Word 2002 or 2003

2. You have automatic language detection activated (Tools/Language/Set language)
OR Windows is switching "Language Input" on you when you press Shift+Alt

3. You have another language, besides English and French, activated for Office
(START/Programs/Microsoft Office/Microsoft Office Tools/"Language Settings")

As a result, at some point Word has decided you're not typing French, but some
other language (you should be able to see that in the status bar, just to the
left of the spell check "book").

In the "tips" section of my website you'll find a discussion on how language
formatting in Word is controlled. Read through that and see if you can track
down what's happening and turn it off.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail