Microsoft Office provides functionality and features designed to support South Asian languages for text entering, editing, and display.
In order to enable the South Asian features in Office, you must be running a 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating system that has South Asian support — for example, a South Asian version of Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, or any language version of Microsoft Windows 2000.
Note Not all of the programs or components in Office support each South Asian function or feature described in this topic.
Dates and time
The date and time format used for each South Asian language is determined by the calendar chosen. The list of calendars that you have available is determined by the languages you have enabled and by the operating system language setting you have selected in the regional options in Windows Control Panel. Depending on the South Asian language you have enabled, you can choose among these calendars: Buddhist (Thai only), Saka Era (Hindi only), and Gregorian (all variants).
When a South Asian language is the installed language, the predominate South Asian calendar for that language will be the default calendar used — for example, for Thai, Buddhist is the default calendar; for Hindi, Western; and for Vietnamese, Gregorian.
Distributed Justification
This feature is available in Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Publisher, and Microsoft PowerPoint, and it justifies Thai or mixed text by adjusting the spacing between characters. In standard justification the spacing between words is adjusted.
Sequence checking
South Asian languages follow stringent grammatical rules that dictate which textual character elements are permitted to stand next to one another in the composition of words. To add to the complexity of correctly entering Thai characters, text contains both simple characters and more complex characters that include one or more markings such as diacritic, tone marks, vowels, and accents. For example, in Thai, leading vowels are normally followed by a consonant that may or may not include vowel markings, yet require diacritic located below it.
To assist you in correctly entering characters that follow the grammatical rules for enabled South Asian languages, programs automatically check the text for you. Also, you can have Office make logical substitutions for you by using Type and Replace, a feature that complements sequence checking.
The Sequence Checking feature is installed automatically in Office programs except Microsoft Word. In Word this feature is an option and must be enabled.
Type and Replace
When enabled with a South Asian language, Office automatically replaces invalid characters that are typed with valid characters. This helps to ensure grammatically correct text.
The Type and Replace feature is a complement to the automatic sequence checking of South Asian text.
Type and Replace is always available in all Office programs except Microsoft Word. In Word it is an option. To make Type and Replace available in Word, you must select sequence checking.