When converting a document from British English to American English I ran into the following problem with the quote marks: all attempts to automate the change (Search&Replace or by a Macro) resulted in every opening quote being converted to a closing one!
Manually typing an opening quote works ok.
By doing the S&R conversion as single-quote to TWO double-quotes I got a closing quote-opening quote pair in the document. Deleting the first one (the closing quote) resulted in the remaining one immediately changing from opening to closing.
As the document I'm working with has 470 opening single-quotes I'm not very keen on doing the job one quote-character a time; so all help will be appreciated!
_Lup

Note: LibreOffice did the conversion with no immediate problems. But later the converted document caused Grammarly (A grammar check program) to crash(multiple tries!); so that solution is not viable.

Same problem on to two PCs. HP Envy and Elitebook, 64bit, Windows 10 Pro, Office 365 (64 bit on the Envy and 32 bit on the Elitebook)

What happens if you change the language and then do a search and replace to find a quote and replace it with a quote (ie. let the smart quotes option work out the direction of each quote)

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks! Interesting idea, but didn't work.
Maybe it's worth adding that I have the Swedish versions of both Windows and Office.
_Lup

Are you saying you are converting a single to two doubles?
That is ' to ""

Then you are deleting the first one
That is
"" becomes "

Why the two steps?

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Naturally I tried a one-to-one conversion first! The one-to-two conversion Was just an experiment to see if anything would change; and interestingly enough, the second character of the pair produced was a correct opening quote!
That was, however, a dead end. Deleting the erroneous first quote character resulted in the second one immediately changing to a closing one.
_Lup

I don't know anything about the Swedish language.

It looks like when you apply the Swedish language to text, Microsoft have configured the software to put all directional quotes in the same closing direction. If I have a paragraph with the spell check in English I get opening and closing quotes (ie two different directions). If I have a paragraph with the spell check in Swedish, all the quotes I get are 'closing' quotes.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

True, but I have the spell checker set to English and in normal typing, there is no problem.
But, certainly, it's tempting to suspect some interaction from the underlying Swedish Word is the culprit. I'll have a look if changing the display language of Word helps.
_Lup

No, changing over to English as Word display language made no difference. But, of course, it's still a "Swedish" version of Office that is the basis...
Guess I'll have to do the conversion "by hand" this time. No fun!
_Lup

The display language in Office shouldn't cause any trouble. I am running a US English installation of Office with Swedish set as the default proofing language.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

The problem is that I have exactly the opposite set-up! Swedish installation with English set as the proofing language!
On the 64 bit installation, I could change the display langue of Word so it looked like an English version, but that didn't help. I guess there is some difference in the internal logic between the English and Swedish versions and that logic stays unchanged when you change the display language. But that's pure guessing!
_Lup

And I suppose changing to dumb (non-directional) quotes is out of the question?

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

No, that's not acceptable.
BUT, your suggestion pointed me the right way!

Here is a way to solve this conundrum:
-First turn off "Straight quotes to smart quotes"
-Then perform the conversion from single to double opening quotes with S&R "Replace all". (Important to copy actual opening single and double quote characters into S&R!)
-Switch "Straigt to Smart" back on
-Perform the conversion for the closing quotes. A bit messy because the need of avoiding genitive and contraction single apostrophes.

Thanks Guessed! You saved my day!
_Lup

But have you tried changing the Windows display language to English, then? That should make it easier for Word to honor the default language setting.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Tried it. Made the problem worse; now it was impossible to create an opening double quote even from the keyboard! Otherwise the same as before.
_Lup

Will try, but not today!
_Lup