As we await the launch of Office 2013, with rumors suggesting it will be made available to the public on March 31, Microsoft says it wants to expand the support for its productivity software suite to even more people across the world.
In a post on the Office blog, Microsoft has announced that Office 2013 will add three new localized Asian languages (Indonesian, Malay and Vietnamese). The blog says:
This means that the User Interface (UI) and User Assistance (UA) content will be available in these languages across Office--including Lync--and as a Language Pack for SharePoint Server 2013. These new language versions will be available to consumers to buy in 2013 and to enterprise customers as part of our Multilingual User Interface or MUI packs. Alongside the Office Client a dedicated Office.com site in the local language will provide more help and tools for making the most of the new Office.
In addition to the new localized languages, Microsoft will also include Language Interface Packs for 13 more languages. This will allow more people to access local UI in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote in Cherokee, Belarusian, K'iche', Kinyarwanda, Kurdish, Punjabi, Scottish Gaelic, Sindhi, Tigrinya, Uyghur, Valencian, and Wolof (sorry, no Klingon). That means Office 2013 will have some kind of support for 106 languages around the world.
Microsoft will also add some more language-based and vocabulary features in Office 2013, including spell checking inside Outlook subject lines, a thesaurus feature for PowerPoint and grammar checking in OneNote.
Finally, Microsoft has added new features to its Language Auto-Detect in Office 2013 that will be made available for 50 languages when the final version is released. Microsoft says:
Imagine that you have an English version of the new Office installed on your PC, but want to write a document in Portuguese. As you start typing your content in Portuguese, Language Auto-Detect will now recognize that you are writing in Portuguese and that you don't currently have the Portuguese proofing tools installed. A pop-up message appears inviting you to download complimentary proofing tools for that language. Minutes later, you can continue writing with full support to check your spelling and enrich all your Portuguese documents.
Source: Office blog | Image via Microsoft
8 Comments - Add comment