MS Word's Phonetic Guide, which adds ruby characters above selected text, should automatically offer pinyin for any Chinese character. But the pinyin is not appearing in the dialog box. Am I doing something wrong?

No, you're not doing anything wrong! I have heard from people all over the world wondering why this does not work for them. There is an easy way to fix this.

After selecting some Chinese characters and bringing up the Phonetic Guide dialog box, you should expect to see pinyin (or zhuyin as appropriate) automatically showing up in the fields I've circled on this screen shot:

So where is the pinyin? It's not you, it's Windows. Something for this feature doesn't install right sometimes. Microsoft long ago released a very specific fix for the zhuyin version of the same problem (see below), but for pinyin they fixed it "accidentally" by releasing the latest pinyin input method as a free separate upgrade. You can install one of these over your existing IME with no harm done and the problem will be solved.

When I reported the pinyin version of this problem to Microsoft in 2007 they confirmed that the bug is not in Word, it is in the Windows Registry, but they offered no help and just told me to wait for an automatic update...which last time I checked (a year later) had still not arrived. If your system is completely up-to-date and this feature still doesn't work, download and install one of the following:

In Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003,
for Office 2007 download the full version of MSPY 2007, or
for Office 2003 download the "Express" version of MSPY 2007, here:
http://www.microsoft.com/china/windows/products/ime/MSPY2007.mspx
(Many thanks to reader Yang Qiong for pointing me at this link.)

In Windows 2000, 98, ME or NT,
for Office XP (2002), download the Global IME here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en
and you may also be interested in the forum post where I found it:
http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?t=2182&page=3

If zhuyin is missing from any Office version, see the Microsoft knowledge base article "Ruby text is not displayed in the Phonetic Guide". This should work for any combination of XP, Vista and Office 2003 or 2007. Note that whoever wrote that article was incorrect in saying "You do not experience this in Office 2007"...just go ahead install the fix.

Despite the MSPY 2007 Chinese-language installation package, my MSPY menus and even the Help files remained in English. I have Office 2007 so I installed the full MSPY2007.msi version. I found only a few minor new features that are not in the "Chinese Simplified - Microsoft Pinyin IME" keyboard that comes with Vista.

The new input method will appear in the control panel's keyboard list as "Microsoft Pinyin IME 2007" (where it will be automatically installed and selected as your default simplified Chinese input method), and it slightly changes the names of the input methods as they appear in the language bar as you can see to the left.

MSPY 2007 also offers three new items in the Option menu: Dictionary Update Service, Register New Word, and Mis-Conversion Report.

These are not major upgrades for most Vista owners, but in Windows XP you would really benefit from upgrading to this latest version of MSPY. But more to the point of this article: it fixes the Phonetic Guide!

Below you see pinyin appearing in my Phonetic Guide. I still think this feature is lousy - to get the Preview text you see here I had to manually tweak the font, alignment and spacing and it's still ugly - but it is free and now it works!

 

Other tips:

For those of you who don't know where to find the Phonetic Guide feature, see this other FAQ on the location of the Phonetic Guide.

If you're getting zhuyin when you want pinyin, or vice versa, see this FAQ on reformatting languages.

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