Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual

Regional and Language Options

Windows XP is by far the most internationally oriented version of Windows to date. It can accommodate any conceivable arrangement of date, currency, and number formats; comes with fonts for dozens of Asian languages; lets you remap your keyboard to type non-English symbols of every ilk; and so on.

Regional Options Tab

If you think that 7/4 means July 4 and that 1.000 is the number of heads you have, skip this section.

But in some countries, 7/4 means April 7, and 1.000 means one thousand. If your PC isn’t showing numbers, times, currency symbols, or dates in a familiar way, click the Customize button to rearrange the sequence of date elements (see Figure 9-14).

Figure 9-14. Lower right: The Regional Options tab is a summary of the crazy settings that you can change by clicking the Customize button—which opens the Customize Regional Options dialog box (upper left). The changes you make here are reflected in the date and time stamps on your files located in list-view folder windows, and in Microsoft Excel (in the case of your Currency-tab choices).

Tip

The Customize Regional Options box (Figure 9-14, left) is where you can specify whether you prefer a 12-hour clock (“3:05 PM”) or a military or European-style, 24-hour clock (“1505”).

Languages Tab

The symbols you use when you’re typing Swedish aren’t the same as when you’re typing English. Microsoft solved this ...