About the Unicode text encoding standard

Microsoft Office is based on the Unicode text encoding standard, a standard that governs character encoding and provides a 16-bit extensible international character coding system for information processing that covers the world's major languages. The Unicode standard defines character encoding and the properties and algorithms that are used in its implementation. For more information about the Unicode standard, see the Unicode Consortium Web site at http://www.unicode.org.

The use of Unicode in Office allows Office programs to display documents correctly, no matter which language they are written in, provided that the operating system supports the characters specific to that language.

Because Office programs are based on the Unicode text encoding standard, you can use them to open and save files in encoding standards for many different languages by using the internal Unicode encoding as the interchange format. For example, you can use Microsoft Word to open a text file encoded in a Greek or Japanese encoding standard on your English-language system.

When you create a Web page by using an Office program, you can set the encoding for the Web page. If you create a Web page in another language, it's a good idea to change the encoding of the page to match the language you use. This minimizes its size and ensures that it can be viewed in older Web browsers. The UTF-8 encoding is a reasonably compact encoding standard for any language, but only version 4 browsers and later support it.