How can I change the language of a OneNote section (or page/notebook)

Question

I have a OneNote section in a notebook named "Personal" and some pages in this section. I can't change the section (or page or notebook) language. I tried changing the Office default language from the language settings but that didn't help.

Is there a way to change the language of an OneNote section, page or notebook. It's really annoying because every time I start typing something new, it sets the proofing & spelling language back to the old default language.

It appears that it might be tied to the input language I've chosen from the windows control panel. In that case, is it possible to decouple the OneNote section/page language from my input language because I really don't want to change my input language and keyboard layout.

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 11 '10 at 19:36

After some testing I can confirm that OneNote always uses the input language set in the Region and Language control panel.

However, you can combine any input language with any keyboard layout (at least in Windows 7), so the (hopefully temporary) fix is to add a new input language combined with the original keyboard layout.

user454322 · Answer 2 · 2016-06-15T09:49:14.343

9

This has a microsft-onenote-2010 tag, I can't tell how it works in 2010 but in OneNote2013 I did:

Select the text or page
Set the desired language in Review > Language > Set Proofing Language

and it worked.

edited Jun 15 '16 at 09:49

answered Mar 19 '15 at 05:41

user454322

217

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 25 '16 at 21:52

1

On OneNote for Mac you can find it at tools >> Set Proofing Language

answered Oct 25 '16 at 21:52

neoswf

141

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 24 '20 at 15:04

1

One can use format painter to apply the proofing language to selected text in OneNote at least as of version 1908 from Office 356.

answered Apr 24 '20 at 15:04

user212328

111

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 27 '12 at 15:28

While this works to some extent, I also found another workaround: Set the first text box of your section to the desired language, and when you want to create another section, type out the first few letters in your text box that's already in the desired language and then use the drag/drop handle to move it to where your new text box should be. It'll retain your desired language.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 25 '18 at 12:03

0

I am also frustrated by this.

In OneNote for Store, there's no such thing as Tools / Review.

So my workaround is: Settings > Proofing > Hide spelling errors.

:(

answered Aug 25 '18 at 12:03

Hendy Irawan

179

PrestigeDev · Answer 7 · 2019-02-22T11:15:07.040

0

The easiest way to set the language for a section in the OneNote 2016 app (requires Windows 10) is to CTRL+A the section, then open the context menu with right-click, click Set Language and pick your language. This approach unfortunately does not work with the OneNote 2016 version included in the MS Office package and therefore is not directly applicable to the described situation above.

edited Feb 22 '19 at 11:15

answered Feb 21 '19 at 15:43

PrestigeDev

101

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 02 '22 at 11:56

Here you need to understand two things.

The first of them is that OneNote detects the language you are typing in. You can of course specify which language should be used at the moment, but later on, in the next paragraphs it will get annoying again.

Another thing is that changing your computer language/region might help but it is not a proper solution. You should use keyboard language settings.

On mac, you should go to System settings -> Keyboard -> Input sources and add desired language. Then you can switch them by pressing Fn button.

So if you are typing in english (and want OneNote to spell check it in english) choose U.S. for instance. If you want to write a paragraph, sentence or a word in the other language, press Fn multiple times to change input language.

How can I change the language of a OneNote section (or page/notebook)

8 Answers8

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