Disable "Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text" option in Office 2016 Mac

Question

Hey... seems that some "smart guy" though that would be "smart" to switch language of word (and other application) in relation of the language of your keyboard input. 

Seems that office for windows has an option called "Automatically switch keyboard to match language of surrounding text" that change the language of your document when you switch your input keyboard. It also seems that option is by default ON in office for Mac and there it no way to turn it off. 

I don't really think this is smart or wise because... I'm Spanish, I bought my Mac on Spain a few years ago. It has a Spanish SHAPEd keyboard. I say shaped because... keyboards don't have language. Are just a device to input keys on a computer and those keys could form different words in different languages. It's true they are shaped with the keys more common use in some languages, but they don't have language. Anyhow... my problem is, I don't live anymore in Spain, I live in Finland, and I still use my computer, with my spanish shaped keyboard. However, I have my OSX in english and I mainly use english as my communication language and the language in my documents. With my spanish shaped keyboard on my mac I perfectly can write in english (and in spanish if it's needed, for example to write an email to my friends). So... why would I change the input language of my keyboard when with shape all the key correspond with the letters and sight they are labelled and I can find all the letters and sights I need to use in english??? Well seems that some ***** at microsoft thought that this would be useful because when you decide to write in other language... you usually change keyboards. OF COURSE, even more if you have a laptop... 

Is there anyway to override this? Is time I put as a default language English US it changes to Spanish... because it deduces that since I'm using a spanish keyboard and I have english (US) as my OSX language I would be writing in spanish, not in english. It doesn't happen if I choose English (CAN)... It keeps perfectly as default language for all the documents... but I really don't thing this is the point. 

So please fix this!!!! You did great work with Office 2016 for Mac, but this is ruining it!

Answer 1

The choice of keyboard in the operating system is important. The actual physical keyboard hardware is not important, excepting only whether the operating system can detect it. This was the clarification I was making. My apologies for not expressing it clearly enough for you to understand.

Answer 2

This wasn't a problem with Office 2011. I wish I could disable it somehow. I want my spell-check on Word to be dependent *only* on the document language I set on Word.

Answer 3

As you can see in my explanation, the only successful workaround that works is to create a custom keyboard with Ukelele. For example, I use english as a main language of my computer, but my keyboard is spanish. I created a english language keyboard with the spanish layout. Works really well and everything is back to normal in office. (more or less)

Answer 4

I suspect Microsoft is REALLY sick of hearing about this one by now :-)

The MVPs went to Redmond in November for the annual Summit, and the Natural Language guys were unwise enough to ask about this feature.

I bet their ears are still ringing!

I think they now clearly understand that we hate it in Mac, and we hate it just as much in Windows :-)

Whether there will be any changes made, and how long such changes might take, I don't know.

But trust me, they understand the problem!

Cheers

Answer 5

I had the same issue. It was annoying. I spent so much time trying to find a solution. The only thing that worked was creating a customized keyboard with Ukelele (Spanish ISO layout but English set as the keyboard language). Thanks a lot!