Lingo 2: The Indezine Review

Introduction
Using Lingo
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

Although it is easy to change the proofing language for specific text placeholders within a PowerPoint presentation, this can be a monotonous and long task. If you need to change the proofing language of over a hundred slides, you can be assured that this might take away a larger part of your working day. Fortunately, our review product can be a huge help! Lingo 2 is a PowerPoint add-in that changes the proofing language of all slides within a presentation at one go! It searches almost everywhere in your presentation to locate instances of language attributes in the Masters, tables, SmartArt, Notes pages, grouped shapes and text boxes, text placeholders, etc -- and changes the proofing language. It leaves out any text within charts, but that's because charts are essentially Excel objects. Even better, Lingo creates a copy of your presentation in the new language without overwriting the existing presentation.

Lingo 2 is from PPTAlchemy, a UK based company. You can learn more about Lingo from their site.

My contact at PPTAlchemy for this review was John Wilson - thank you, John.

Using Lingo

Download the installer from the link given above, and run the setup routine. Even if you do not download and install Lingo, you can follow this walkthrough to understand Lingo better:

1. Launch any PowerPoint presentation that requires the proofing language to be changed.
2. Now, access the Review tab of the Ribbon, and click the Global Lang ID button, as shown highlighted in red in Figure 1.
3. 
   Figure 1: Global Lang ID button within the Review tab of the Ribbon
3. This opens the Language dialog box, as shown in Figure 2.
4. 
   Figure 2: Language dialog box
4. Within the Language dialog box, click the Choose the language required drop-down list (highlighted in red in Figure 2 above). Scroll down the drop-down list to see which languages are available, and select any language. Over 160 languages are available -- for this tutorial, we chose French, as shown in Figure 3.
5. 
   Figure 3: Drop-down list displaying all the languages available
6. You can select the Set Default Language check box (highlighted in blue in Figure 2 above) to set any selected language as the default proofing language.
5. This starts the language changing process, as you can see in Figure 4. This may take just a minute.
6. 
   Figure 4: Changing proofing language for entire presentation
6. Once the language changing process is done, a message window comes up, as shown in Figure 5. This provides a confirmation that the original presentation has not been changed and that you should provide a name to save the new presentation with the changed proofing language.
7. 
   Figure 5: Presentation’s proofing language has been changed
7. Click OK in this message window, and save the presentation with a new name.

Pricing and Support

Lingo 2 costs $29.99. Support is through e-mail.

Conclusion

Lingo 2 does something essential so quick! Doing this same task without Lingo 2 can be an absolute nightmare -- if you need to work in presentations that need to be proofed in foreign languages often, then Lingo 2 can be a life saver.