I'm really perplexed by this situation. A user reported, "I looked down, looked up, and office was in Japanese. Then I got it back to English and then it was Korean. I didn't change or download anything."
When I remote in, I see that they have five copies of Office 365 installed, all in different languages, and all installed just yesterday. The uninstall process only took around four minutes, which suggests the whole Office suite was there multiple times—once in each: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, British English, and the original American English. There's nothing in the Downloads directory from today that could explain this. The OS language settings seem normal, and we typically don't operate in any other languages here. What's particularly strange is that they accomplished this without any admin rights. How on earth did this happen? Is there a feature I'm unaware of? Just to clarify, this isn't some OEM installation where multiple versions come preloaded; it's our standard setup from a blank media creation tool image that's English-only.
5 Answers
I had to deal with this when we ordered laptops from Dell. We had to specifically ask for a 'single language' edition of Windows, otherwise, it would install all the languages it could find. Such a headache!
I've seen this kind of issue before, usually with the French version popping up for no reason. It makes you wonder if somehow a special character input—like an accented ‘e’—could trigger Microsoft to install other languages. I've even had to manually uninstall languages I didn’t want during setup just to avoid this.
Did they possibly type an alt code that caused this? Like Microsoft just assumed it needed to load all Spanish Office because of some character? That would be wild!
Maybe the user accidentally triggered something with the Office Deployment Tool? If they figured out how to use that, it's possible that several language packs could have been installed at once.
The same thing happened to us, and it really made me want to scream at Microsoft. I think a lot of these installations just slip through the cracks because no one actually knows what triggers it!
When I first installed Windows 11, I had a bizarre experience similar to this too. I ended up uninstalling all but the English versions to fix it. It seems like a glitch that just happens sometimes.
It's crazy how these things can just occur without explanation. I think it’s just Microsoft being Microsoft!
Honestly, this sounds like it could be an issue with the configuration files. If they get corrupted or not set correctly, it might just default to installing multiple languages.
It's not just French! I've seen configurations where certain language packs end up installing when the XML files are corrupted or misconfigured... they just default to something! Crazy, right?