27 Jul 2006
Microsoft / Windows

Reading multi language text in Microsoft Office

Reading documents with Cyrillic text is a breeze on a Mac, but with MS Office it can be a right pain the backside. If your company does business in the Russian market it can be very frustrating. Here’s a quick tip on how to read multi language characters – to write Cyrllic and co, you’ll have to buy a license*.

Microsoft Component To Read Cyrillic Text

  1. You need a (free) component from Microsoft in order to do that – bad luck if you work in a corporate environment and have no Admin rights.
    Download details: Office 2003 Add-in: Desktop Language Settings
  2. Since Office applications does not have encoding detection, you’ll have to import the data into Excel.
  3. Bingo!

* At least, that was my understanding when I wrote this. Things may have changed since.