Setting the language in Word

It was an issue bugging me for a while when I went to spell check in Word (Office 2003), it defaulted to English-US even though the English-Aus was also checked in the list.

I went to use the Office's Office 2003 language settings tool to no avail as it was already correctly saying the default language is 'English (Australia)'. I use the Word's Tools | Language | Set Language... menu including setting English-AUS as the default in Normal.Dot, via the 'Default...' button. Again with no success.

Being a experience Internationalisation programmer and with detail knowledge of how Internationalisation issues are handled by the operating system, it dawn on me that the fix is not in Word or Office suite. They merely follow orders or hints.

A check on the default input locale revealed that I was using 'English - US' as the default input rather than 'English (Australia) - US'.

Once that is corrected, Word automatically defaults to use English (aus) spell checker and date.