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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.

8 Answers 8

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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.

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  • Thanks for the hint that I can add additional keyboard layouts to an input language. It solves the problem good enough for me.
    – Damir Arh
    Aug 3, 2012 at 12:35
  • This is not the correct answer. See user454322's answer below Apr 13, 2017 at 21:49
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    His answer doesn't solve the problem (see my comment below that answer). Apr 14, 2017 at 13:36
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This has a microsft-onenote-2010 tag, I can't tell how it works in 2010 but in OneNote2013 I did:

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

and it worked.

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    This doesn't solve the original problem - even after changing the proofing language, any new text entered gets the default language as its proofing language, making it extremely annoying to write notes in any non-default language. Mar 19, 2015 at 20:03
  • This works with One Note 2013 too. Thanks for the tip.
    – codea
    Apr 13, 2015 at 11:46
  • This should be the selected answer Apr 13, 2017 at 21:49
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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.

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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.

:(

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

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

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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.

enter image description here

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    The OneNote in your image is the app version included with Windows 10. Have you tested this with the version of OneNote included with MS Office? OPs question is from before OneNote existed as an app and before Windows 10. It would be helpful to add some lines to your answer noting that you answer requires the app version and therefore Windows 10 and is not directly applicable to OPs situation. Feb 21, 2019 at 16:19
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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.

enter image description here

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.

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