Upgrading Reference for Localized Versions of Office

Sharing Office Files Across Language Versions

When all users in an international organization have upgraded to Microsoft Office 2000, sharing files across languages is easy, whether the files are from Office 2000 with the Microsoft Office 2000 MultiLanguage Pack or localized versions of Microsoft Office 2000. But even during a gradual upgrade to Office 2000, you can still share files with older localized versions of Office.

If you are upgrading gradually to Office 2000, you can save Office 2000 files in formats that allow users of previous localized versions of Office to open the files, yet preserve the Office 2000 multilingual features. These file formats vary by Office application.

However, if you save Office 2000 files in the format of the previous localized version, multilingual features of Office 2000 are lost. For example, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 can display multiple Asian languages in the same file. When these files are saved in a previous version of Office, the multi-Asian language feature is lost and only one of the languages is displayed properly.

Unicode allows you to share multilingual files between Office 2000 and Office 97 without any loss of text. Older versions of Office might not properly display multilingual text from an Office 2000 file. This is because versions of Office prior to 97 are based on code pages.

In addition, your operating system can determine whether you can display Asian or right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, or Urdu) text between different versions of Office.

To display a right-to-left language, you must be running a right-to-left language version of your operating system. To display Asian languages, see the following:

• Office 2000 provides files — including fonts — that extend an operating system’s ability to support Asian languages.
• The Office 97 Asian support files — including fonts — extend an operating system’s ability to support Asian languages.
• To display or edit Asian text in an older version of Office, you must run a language version of the operating system that matches the Asian language with which you want to work.

Note   Office 2000 upgrades fonts commonly used in Word and PowerPoint templates so that the fonts support multiple scripts. These fonts are Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Bookman Old Style, Garamond, and Impact.

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See also

If your organization is upgrading from a previous version of Office, there are several strategies for making a smooth transition, beyond considerations for multilingual support. For more information, see Before You Upgrade to Office 2000.

The Unicode standard provides unique character values for every language that Office supports and makes it even easier to share multilingual documents. For more information, see Sharing Multilingual Documents.

For some languages, you need to have an operating system and fonts that allow you to display and edit the text. For more information, see Configuring Users’ Computers in an International Environment.