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Is there any way of setting the language of a Powerpoint presentation to be different from the system language?

I found ways for changing the language of currently existing placeholders (and also VBA code for changing all text). E.g.

How do I change the language of all Powerpoint slides at once?

Change the spell-checking language on a PowerPoint presentation

and many other links from googling.

But these do not act for anything to be inserted in the future. Thus, I might use this after the presentation is finished, but it is still a workaround, and it is incomplete, as I might forget applying it after finishing, or someone else might not do it in shared work.

EDIT PS: This is a follow-up question for

Powerpoint language does not follow slide master

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  • If you want any document to be in another language you have to translate the text from one language to another yourself. Simply changing the language of the dictionary won't do very much. Do you mean something else entirely? You have to have perfect grammar for automatic translation tools to be helpful, even then, translation from on language to another is best done by a human.
    – Ramhound
    Dec 30, 2013 at 15:06
  • @Ramhound - I was not referring to translating, but to the spell checking language. Please see the answer posted and the linked questions, they all refer to the same.
    – sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
    Dec 31, 2013 at 10:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This will change the default language for a given presentation:

With ActivePresentation .DefaultLanguageID = msoLanguageIDEnglishAUS End With

It will not change any already-inserted text but any text added afterwards will be set to the default language.

There's a "gotcha" you'll want to be aware of. While the name of the property suggests that this code will only affect the active presentation, it actually sets the default language for this AND ANY NEW PRESENTATIONS YOU CREATE until you change the language back to whatever it was before.

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  • Interesting. And it is certainly misleading that something that is (presumably) a property of a presentation actually affects something more likely a property of the application (at least in this case it is documented). I take it there is no way of affecting only the current presentation. Moreover, since it appears to be a property of the app, if taking one ppt set to, say, EN-US, into another system set to ES-LA, I guess that inserting a new slide will use ES-LA, not EN-US...
    – sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
    Dec 30, 2013 at 20:01
  • If I have a presentation set to Argentine Spanish and open it in PPT set to EN-US default, existing text remains Spanish, but new shapes/text and new slides are EN-US (since that's the default for the app). I mentioned my LanguageSelector add-in in the other thread we're following; you can use it to test this stuff if you like. The free demo will set the language for the presentation and up to the first five slides.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Dec 31, 2013 at 4:05

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