Chinese characters in Office 2003?

[zag]

Anyone know how to show Chinese characters in office 2003?

 

The language packs only seem to be available for office 2007 and cost money

[Geoff]

You need to install the Chinese Edition of Office 2k3 and switch the system to a Chinese locale.

[zag]

You need to install the Chinese Edition of Office 2k3 and switch the system to a Chinese locale.

 

Ouch! that doesn't sound very practical for 30 laptops just for one day :/

 

Anyone know any 3rd party software that can write in Chinese, I'm afraid im a little in the dark on this one

[Geoff]

Open Office

[enjay]

I'm resurrecting this one, as we've just started teaching Mandarin here - does anyone know how best to make this available on a CC3 computer?

 

The Mandarin teacher is reasonably computer-competent so could handle changing locales if needed, however the PC must function in English throughout the rest of the week, so the solution needs to be temporary and user-changeable.

 

It would be useful to have the Chinese characters showing in My Computer too if at all possible, as the teacher has named a number of files using Chinese characters.

[zag]

Yeh its a tough one, we simply got the mandarin teacher to use her own laptop which was using a Chinese version of XP. Seems to work ok and I even learnt some Chinese trying to get it to work on the projector

[sparkeh]

Posted this over in communities as well but what about this do-dah:

 

Download details: Office 2003 Add-in: Desktop Language Settings

[enjay]

@ITTech - I don't really want to go down that road if I can help it; also the need may arise to put this across more computers so that the students can do homework or whatever.

 

@Sparkeh - that looks promising; how easily does it deploy on CC3, preferably across multiple computers? How easy is it to switch between languages? Does it affect the computer or the user? Okay, enough questions for one post!

[imiddleton25]

We use njstar Chinese Language Software, Japanese & Korean Software by NJStar 南极星

 

girls here say its fine

[User3204]

We've been teaching Chinese (and Russian) for ages, and to get around this issue, we have installed on Windows not Office, the different keyboards for these in Regional settings.

And then it's ready for when office is running.

 

It can be a bit of an arse to get right, depending upon how you do the user profiles. Ours aren't roaming or mandatory, so it uses the local "default user". What we usually do is install the languages at first boot after a sysprep, although we do ahve to install them BEFORE this, as otherwise it asks for the Windows CDROM.

 

You can switch between the locales by pressing ALT+SHIFT, at which point all the students start changing the language to confuse people.

[enjay]

You can switch between the locales by pressing ALT+SHIFT, at which point all the students start changing the language to confuse people.

 

That's what I'm worried about - it will be like the rotating Intel graphics screen all over again!

[User3204]

..tough.

 

If you make sure English (UK is set to be the default Locale, it changes it back to this when they logoff.

But they can still fiddle at the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen, but you just have to tell the teachers how to change it.

 

We have two computer rooms dedicated to Languages (we're a Language College), and so I only install it onto these machines.

[enjay]

Posted this over in communities as well but what about this do-dah:

 

Download details: Office 2003 Add-in: Desktop Language Settings

 

So, I've installed that, but I'm at a slight loss as to how to actually use it. What should I be clicking on in order to make Chinese characters display correctly?

[enjay]

We've been teaching Chinese (and Russian) for ages, and to get around this issue, we have installed on Windows not Office, the different keyboards for these in Regional settings.

 

And that allows the characters to be visible in PowerPoints, web pages, etc? How do you go about installing additional keyboards? I've never had cause to do it before now...

[User3204]

Yes.

 

Start > Control Panel > Regional Settings and Language options >

 

If you're adding at a later stage you have to do this:

> "Advanced" > (and then tick all the relevant conversion tables )

If you do this at Windows XP install time then you can bypass it, and go straight through to:

 

> "Languages" > "Details" > "Add" >

 

Then select the Input language, and keyboard, I think you'll probably want "Chinese (PRC)" for language, with the UK keyboard.

 

It'll need the CD, unless you have already installed the keyboard layouts.

I think you can specify this in a Sysprep answer file...

 

It then means when you have selected the Chinese, you get a silly little pop-up, that when you type phonetic chinese (the only word I know is "li") it will print instead the symbol.

 

 

It is, apparently, very difficult to type in Russian, with a UK keyboard, but Chinese is workable.

[enjay]

To feed back on this one, it can be done without rebuilds or any installations by going to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages [tab] > tick "Install files for East Asian languages" and then restart the PC. This obviously requires a visit to each computer so isn't suitable for wide-scale deployment, but works fine in the one teaching room.