Klingon language support for Office 2007 added (31 March, 2009)

I’m sorry to disappoint the Trekkies and other enthusiasts about this news but of course this was an April Fool’s joke. However, only very little picture editing had to be done to achieve these results. Most of it can be achieved already by modifying your font settings in Windows and Outlook. You can choose a font other than Klingon as well if you like

Office 2007 is localized in 37 languages and offers proofing tools for even more languages. A new language will be added to this collecting; Klingon.

For the ones not familiar with that language; Klingon is a fictional language spoken in the Star Trek series and movies with Lt. Worf probably being the most famous Klingon. The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) is an independent organization that supports the studying of the language for well over 15 years now. The Klingon language itself celebrates its 25 year anniversary this year since actual grammar was developed for it for the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

Support for it will be added as a Language Pack meaning that not only proofing support will be added but also the interface can be set to appear in Klingon. However, there are certain limitations to this since several sections of the interface rely on the language of Windows itself and its configured locale. You can see this for instance in the time notations (I used an English version of Windows XP with a Dutch locale on my test machine). Additionally, subjects and names cannot be written in Klingon as they are not included in the Unicode character set and to prevent potential encoding issues on mail servers. It is also funny to see that the product names (Microsoft Outlook/Exchange) are not translated either.

The Klingon Language Pack will come out together with the Office 2007 SP2 updates for the other language packs which are currently available already. Additional languages are expected as well.

Klingon is the first fictional language that will be supported in Office.
(Click on the pictures for a larger view)

     Files and Settings guide for Outlook (24 March, 2009)

This guide is not for the faint hearted. If you are looking for a way to just backup your Outlook data, please take a look at this guide. If you are looking for a way to conveniently backup your Outlook data and settings or want to move your Outlook data and settings to another computer, please take a look at this blog post. If you are in IT support or just are interested to find out which files Outlook uses and where it stores its settings; this is the guide for you.