Wednesday, October 6, 2010

MS Onenote -> Multilanguage proofing

Despite MS Onenote is an excellent tool for taking note on an on going work. There is a very annoying issue when the user desire to take notes in an other language as is computer system language defined by is keyboard! In MS Word you can change the global proofing language for the whole document in a permanent fashion, but in MS Onenote for an obscure reason this option do not exists. The user is supposed to select the text to be proofed in an other language, then go to tab "review", select "language" and finally "proofing tool".

 Of course this is a very fastidious way to proceed.

The proposed approach is to find a way around  the limitation of MS Onenote, using the regional options of the computer. For this purpose we will take an example:
Lets say the computer is set to "French" with a "Swiss French" keyboard, but the user user desires to take notes in English. Simply changing the computer option to English is annoying because the keyboard will then be "American" and the user usually do not want to change is hardware. So the approach is to set the system to get per example "English" and "Swiss French" keyboard:

First get to Control Panel:
 Then go to Clock, And Region

Then click on "Change display languages":


Then click on "Change keyboards..."


Then click the "Add" button:


Then for our example, you need to select "English" and open the "keyboard" menu with the "+" under the "English" tree node as shown on the image below:



Once the "keyboard" submenu is open select "show more":


As next Select the desired keyboard, in our example "Swiss French"



To make this configuration, the default configuration of your computer select it under "Default input language":





To switch from one configuration to the other in a quick fashion the user can use the quick access bar shortcuts:


This finalize my first technical notes, if you have comments and/or suggestion please let me know.

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