OL2000: How to Enable Japanese/Chinese Support in Outlook 2000

This article describes how to read Chinese or Japanese using the English US version of Outlook.

Reading Chinese or Japanese in Outlook can be accomplished in two different ways.

Install the Japanese or Chinese support for Microsoft Internet Explorer, and use HTML as the mail format.

Use Microsoft Office 2000 Foreign Language Support to view Japanese and Chinese characters in both Microsoft Rich Text and HTML format. This method only allows you to read Japanese or Chinese characters in the message body and can also be used in other Office programs. To do this, install the Japanese or Chinese fonts for Office.

To Install the Office International Support Files

1. Close all programs.
2. Place the Office 2000 CD in the drive. If the installer starts to load, click Cancel.
3. Click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.
4. Double-click Add/Remove Programs.
5. Click to select Microsoft Office 2000 <version> and then click Add/Remove.
6. Click Add or Remove Features.
7. Click the plus sign to expand the Office Tools tree, and then click to expand International Support.
8. Click each item that you want to install, and then click Run from My Computer. To select all items, click International Support, and then click Run all from My Computer.
   
   The following files are required for Japanese, and Chinese Language support: Core Support, Extended Support, and Bi-Directional Support.
   
   The following Fonts are required for each of their respective Languages: Traditional Chinese Font, Simplified Chinese Font, and the Japanese Font. After you select each of these, the box beside them should turn white.
9. After you select all the components, click Update Now. This installs the selected international components.

NOTE: The International Language Support is only available for Office 2000. The support files will not enable International Support in programs other than Office. Messages and documents containing International Characters sets may not be compatible with older versions of Office.

Subject and From Fields

Two-byte character sets such as Japanese and Chinese are not viewable in the Subject and From fields of Outlook e-mail messages. The Subject and From fields in Outlook use the code page (character set) of the operating system. Microsoft Windows 95/98 does not include native support for Chinese or Japanese. You can install the support for multiple languages in Internet Explorer, this support is only available for Internet Explorer, and Outlook when viewing HTML formatted messages. The International Language support files for Internet Explorer do not provide Windows 95/98 with the ability to view international character sets. In Outlook, only the body of the e-mail messages is designed to work with any character set other than the default Windows characters. To view Japanese or Chinese in the Subject or From, the operating system has to fully support that language.