Spaw,

A slight thread creep about UK English and MS Word: You can set the dictionary in Word to UK English by highlighting your text, clicking on the review tab, and using the "set language" function you'll find there. Choose UK English. Word will then theoretically find on a spellcheck anything that doesn't look to it like UK English.

However, that's not going to get you anything that looks much like UK English, because Oxford (and more recently Chambers, and I don't know which other UK dictionaries) have all bought into an initiative called "global English" that promotes the use of one standard spelling for many words that are traditionally spelled differently in the U.S. than in the UK...and the spellings they've chosen are what we'd think of as the U.S. ones.

I spend much of my day translating technical marketing materials for a major tech firm from U.S. English to UK English, and I can thus attest that the spellcheck is perfectly bloody useless. It accepts these "global" spellings, whereas the native readers of UK English with whom I work deem them completely unacceptable. I am sure there are many UK residents who are ready or even eager to adopt "global English" spelling, but the ones I know are not.

So I built a lengthy conversion macro that I run, and then I do a lot of additional tedious work by hand, whenever I need to translate a document into UK English. In fact I'm working on one right now, snd I should get back to it...

Cheerio!
Claire