ter Smitten's

When preparing a presentation for my Bachelor thesis on “Confabulation in the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome” I was really annoyed by Powerpoint. The presentation had to be written in Dutch, but for all new “text boxes” I created, the spell-check was set to English. At first, I tried to change the “Default language” of Powerpoint, but that wouldn’t do the trick. After googling for some time I found this nice macro that would set the “msoLanguage” language for all text elements in the presentation.

Follow these steps and you’ll be alright:

1. Find the right msoLanguage code, for Dutch (msoLanguageIDDutch), for (US) English (msoLanguageIDEnglishUS)
2. Create a new macro:
   1. Go to Tools, Macro, Visual Basic Editor
   2. Insert a new empty module by selecting Insert, Module
3. Paste this code on the right panel and save the macro:

   Option Explicit
   Public Sub ChangeSpellCheckingLanguage()
       Dim j As Integer, k As Integer, scount As Integer, fcount As Integer
       scount = ActivePresentation.Slides.Count
       For j = 1 To scount
           fcount = ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes.Count
           For k = 1 To fcount
               If ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes(k).HasTextFrame Then
                   ActivePresentation.Slides(j).Shapes(k) _
                   .TextFrame.TextRange.LanguageID = msoLanguageIDEnglishAUS
               End If
           Next k
       Next j
   End Sub
   

4. Execute the macro

References:

• http://superuser.com/questions/55034/change-the-spell-checking-language-on-a-powerpoint-presentation
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa432635.aspx