Question : Office Language Settings on Remote Desktop Server 2008 R2

We have a strange problem on a new Remote Desktop Server that is causing me a bit of a headache.

We have a Remote Desktop Server on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Office 2010 Professional Plus installed for the clients to access on ThinClients based within our Head Office and on Remote Sites.

The language settings on the server are all set to English UK (with keyboards, login interface, new user accounts, etc all defaulting to English (UK)) and we have installed MS Office 2010 using the Admin Configurator initially to setup all the language and license information defaulting this all to the same as the server.

As this is a new server we are only running a few accounts at the moment until the snagging is complete then the server will be deployed across the domain for our remote workers to use.

The problem we are having is that the language settings in Office are still defaulting to English (US) even though it is all set to English (UK).  When you insert a date in MS Excel 2010 it shows correctly as a UK date (DD/MM/YYYY) but when you look at the cell information it is set to US Date Type and when you change this to UK Date it reverts to MM/DD/YYYY.

The User Accounts are given permissions to access a RD/TS Server through Group Policy and Security Groups and the default GPO for this has the language settings set to English (UK) also.

The issue this is causing is all documents created in Office 2007 have the dates set to English (UK) under cell formatting which means when a user opens the document in an RD Session all the dates are shown incorrectly and the dictionary is also defaulting to English (US) which means that the majority of a document (be it Word or Excel) is underlined in Red to show spelling or grammar errors.

I have tried to uninstall Office and reinstall it selecting each option individually at install and this still has the same problem which is making me think that this is related to the server and not the application itself.

Any help would be appreciated.



Peter

Answer : Office Language Settings on Remote Desktop Server 2008 R2

It is not necessary to hack the registry, it can be done using common settings. I actually had the same issues when I switched my language from English US to English Canada. It seemed the bloody US English took any changes to make itself as default anywhere you go. :-(

Anyway, eventually it disappeared. :-))

A checklist for you (better in the order). Make sure

Control Panel | Regional and Language Options:

1. Regional Options - Standards and Formats: English (UK)
2. Regional Options - Location: UK
3. Languages - Details - Settings - Default Input Language: English (UK) - US
4. Languages - Details - Settings - Installed Services: English (UK) ----- Make sure English (US) is deleted
5. Advanced - Language for non-Unicode Programs: English (UK)
6. Advanced - Default User Account Settings - Checked

Microsoft Office Language Settings

7. Editing Languages - Available Editing Languages: English (UK) ----- Make sure English (US) is removed
8. Editing Languages - Primary Editing Language: English (UK)

Microsoft Word / Excel / PowerPoint

9. Status Bar: English (UK)
10. Language: English (UK)
11. Language - Default: English (UK) ---- Must save the template after changing default language

11 places to go!!

Good luck,