I usually prefer to use English versions of all operating systems and applications I use — simply because the German translations are usually horrible, plus very often updates for English versions become available much earlier (if at all!) than for localized versions.

Now I just bought myself Office 2010 and found that it lacked proofing tools for German — call me naive but I expected that these “common” tools were available in all or at least major languages. Duh! 🙁

So what I did is to download the German office installation package from Microsoft and started SETUP.EXE. To my surprise adding German as a proofing language was simpler than I even thought. After a while Setup properly showed me

• all the components I had already installed,
• the language English I had installed, plus
• German as an optional (UI!) language to install, and
• in the packages section another German proofing tools package appeared that I could then install.

Maybe the above is obvious to all or most of you, but I thought it’s not exactly that so I’d create a post about it to help people who are in the same situation as I was.

Enjoy!