[ #Office365 ] Language settings…

Language settings in Office 365 can and should be made at several places. Here is a quick summary of where this can be done and what impact it has.

1. On the Delve profile, go to Office 365 settings

The first place to go is to the “new” Delve powered profile, there settings will give you access to some (not all unfortunately) setting places:

You can also go there from SharePoint online by choosing “Office 365 settings”

The “Office 365” settings link bring you to the global Office 365 settings panel:

From there clicking on “Language and Time zone” allows to change Office 365 main language setting.

Once changed to French for example, the page changed to French display. And it impacts all pages under https://portal.office.com/account

And also the Office 365 homepage, the admin portal, le Delve Profile,

and interestingly even the waffle on English configured apps (here Outlook in English with waffle menu in French):

Note that the option appearing in the settings menu is the same as the one in my account settings

Documentation is here: Change account settings in Office 365 for business

2. On the Outlook settings

Let’s go back to Delve Profile, Settings, and then click on Mail (on “your app settings” category).

Here we arrive in Outlook settings and going to “General”, “Region and time zone” we can set a new display language:

After this change, Outlook including Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Delve, Groups (the outlook part of it in fact, not the files tool), Planner, Office Video, Office Store changed their display language.

3. For SharePoint

SharePoint has its own language mechanism which is not accessible from the Delve Profile, but directly in any SharePoint site collection. Each one can have its own set of Language parameters.

Language used to render site is governed by the defaults set at the site collection level, in language settings

You can there choose among a lot of languages as all available language packs are installed in SharePoint Online.

Once language settings for a site collection has been set here, the end-user can override the site default by using its own SharePoint profile settings

 

This way the same site can display menu in several languages for several users:

Documentation about this is:

• Change regional settings for a site 
• Change your personal language and region settings

 

4. For OneDrive

It’s similar to SharePoint as the settings menu will bring us to the “Site settings” of the “hidden” OneDrive site collection:

This setting has an impact on OneDrive for Business personal space in Office 365:

5. For Yammer

Yammer has still its own independent configuration settings:

6. For Power BI

Power BI has also its own independent configuration settings:

7. For Office Online (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote online)

Guess what? Office online has its own way to change display language! You should go to the waffle anywhere in the suite and choose one of the online tool. Let’s pick Word online for example:

You then arrive in a landing page where you will find on the bottom left a way to change default display language:

 

Choice is huge!

This changed the display language for the first three members of the suite:

But OneNote Online doesn’t appear to follow the same way… And I didn’t find any way to force language display setting in OneNote online! If you know any way to do that please comment below.

8. For Sway

Sway just don’t have any language settings. It relies on browser default language content to choose the language it displays menus. Here is for example a way to change user interface to French in Firefox:

Result is here:

9. PowerApps and Flow

At this time, these new apps don’t have specific mechanisms to set change default display language. So they use the browser parameter to change their display language.

However, PowerApps is not totally translated yet, as seen in the following screenshot:

10. Final thoughts

It appears that at some time user interface even with a full English profile in Office 365 can be “influenced” by local settings of the browser, like for example in this snapshot:

where menu title is in English (“All documents”) and menu items are in French. So I strongly discourage using different settings in Office 365 profile and in the browser.

And if we can understand that all tools have a different history and so different way to set display language, for end-users it can sometimes be a real nightmare so let’s hope some homogenization in this area in a near future.