Set language in date formfield

[José Spanjaard]

Version: 2008 (12.1.3, Dutch)

Hi all,

In a template (dotx) with several form fields, I have a form field for a
date in the middle of a paragraph. There are two problems with this field and
I am mentioning them both, because there may be a connection between them (?):
1. The document's language (in style Normal) is Dutch, but the date keeps
appearing in English, even after manually applying Dutch as language.
2. The paragraph is formatted in a custom paragraph style, based on style
Normal with only 'bold' added to it. After entering the date in this field,
the bold formatting disappears in the field. The remainder of the paragraph
remains correctly formatted.

Can anyone help me with this? Thank you!
José

 

[Peter Jamieson]

As far as I can tell, the language that Mac Word uses to display these
particular dates is the one that you specify in Microsoft ofiice
2008->Microsoft Language Register->Microsoft Language Register. No other
language settings appear to affect it (and since you have the Dutch language
version of Word, perhaps even that does not affect it) - not the paragraph
language, surrounding text language, probably not the UI language and
nothing in the Mac language setup that I have found so far. Here, I only get
to choose between English and Japanese, and even when I choose Japanese,
date formats such as DD MMMM YYYY display English month names - only the
choices with Japanese characters apper to display what I assume are Japanese
format dates. So even if you have a choice between Dutch and English in this
utility, it is not clear that you will end up with Dutch dates.

(FWIW this is roughly equivalent to the situation on Windows Word where the
language used to display these dates is the "Primary Editing language" that
is set in the Office Language Settings. The language settings in Control
Panel regional options, the language of the paragraph/style, and the
language currently used for input do not seem to affect it at all. With
ordinary fields (e.g. REF fields) date formatting does take account of the
language of the text, but attempting to apply a date format switch within
the FORMTEXT field makes no difference.)

If changing that makes no difference, then
a. IMO it is an error that needs fixing by Microsoft
b. I guess the best you can do is to use a numeric date format to sidestep
the language issue.

 

[José Spanjaard]

Thank you Peter, for your extensive reply! I am afraid though, that it indeed
did not solve my problem. I will report the problem to Microsoft.

José