NOTE: This should ONLY be tried with Office 2010. DO NOT try with this Office 2007, Office 2003, or Office 97 files. I have no idea if Live Writer will crash or have undesired affects using older version of Office files and I do not want to have to track down crashes for something that is unsupported in general.
First read the note above! Second this is NOT supported so use at your own risk. I have high confidence that this will work with Office 2010 files since Windows Live Writer 2011 used the same autocorrect file as Office 2010 but we only tested with the English file so there is a minor chance that a localize file might not work.
In a previous post I explained how to add additional dictionaries for use with Live Writer. In Microsoft Office, the applications with keep in sync a localized autocorrect list that matches the editing language and dictionary assuming there is an autocorrect list for that language (sometimes they use English when autocorrect does not make sense for a language and sometimes they do nothing at all). In Live Writer regardless of what dictionary you are using, or what your UI you are using, your autocorrect will always be in English. If you own Office 2010 and you really want to use a localized autocorrect list here is how you do it. I should note that this will change the built in autocorrect list and not the custom autocorrect list you can create and use with Office. Live Writer does not support a custom autocorrect list. Second note is that this will change your autocorrect list for Live Mail in addition to Live Writer. Please make sure you want to have it replaced and used in both applications.
- Verify that you have Office 2010 – if you do not then please stop reading now.
- Navigate to your “Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Dictionaries\” folder
- Rename mso.acl to mso.bak – this way you can go back to your original file
- Navigate to your “Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14” folder
- Navigate to folder for the Locale ID (LCID) for the language that that you want to use. Office use LCID as defined in the table found on Locale IDs assigned by Microsoft. Look at that list and find the LCID that matches the language you want to use. Live Writer ships with English – 1033. Here is a subset of that list including many of the common languages that Windows Live Writer is localized to:
Language – Country/Region LCID Dec Arabic – Saudi Arabia 1025 Basque 1069 Bulgarian 1026 Catalan 1027 Croatian 1050 Czech 1029 Dutch – Netherlands 1043 English – United States 1033 English – United Kingdom 2057 English – Australia 3081 English – Canada 4105 Estonian 1061 Finnish 1035 French – France 1036 German – Germany 1031 German – Switzerland 2055 Greek 1032 Hebrew 1037 Hungarian 1038 Italian – Italy 1040 Japanese 1041 Korean 1042 Latvian 1062 Lithuanian 1063 Malay – Malaysia 1086 Polish 1045 Portuguese – Brazil 1046 Portuguese – Portugal 2070 Romanian 1048 Russian 1049 Serbian (Cyrillic) 3098 Serbian (Latin) 2074 Slovak 1051 Slovenian 1060 Spanish – Spain (Modern Sort) 3082 Spanish – Mexico 2058 Swedish 1053 Turkish 1055 Ukrainian 1058 So if you wanted to use the French autocorrect list you would go to the 1036 folder
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Copy the mso.acl file from that folder to the “Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Dictionaries\” folder
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Boot Writer and try a word that you know will autocorrect for that language. For example, with French if you type “contr ece” it should autocorrect to “contre ce”.
To switch back, just rename mso.back to mso.acl. Note that running setup to, say, switch your UI language or to upgrade your Windows Live Writer could revert the mso.acl file back to English. A repair operation could also set it back to English.
As stated above this is unsupported however I know that many users would like to have autocorrect that matches their editing and UI language.
