Q ✨ 🔜 CoSinTIL Excel localises formulas, and will error if you put the wrong language in
mildly horrifying
R@q they have historically fucked it up before! https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2010/06/05/10019465.html
Sky-haired Miranda 💙🐙@q Yeah, it annoys me every time I use Excel at work (not that often, luckily). I'm used to the English names but all the Microsoft stuff we have to use at work is configured in French, so it expects the french names -_-
4censord 
Nico
Russ Garrett
Julian
n@chtpfoetchen@q I wanted to make the point of gnumeric is just superior, with just offering english, but welp. I guess not. https://www.gnumeric.org/
Tóth Gábor Baltazár@q
yes... I am painfully aware of this
yes... I am painfully aware of this
Morgan Hill@q the number of hours I've lost when people ask me to help with a spreadsheet probably deserves its own sheet.
Christian Berger DECT 9314@q Before Office 97 Office also localized Visual Basic for Applications and therefore OLE automation. So when calling that from Delphi you suddenly have to deal with objects that have method names like "Öffnen".
Oriel Jutty 
@q Last time I looked, their documentation handled that really badly. They took the list of function names, sorted it, then translated it (instead of sorting it after translating). So e.g.
ZEICHEN is somewhere near the beginning of the list because CHAR starts with a C.
Matt Gray@q wait if you open a eg. German XLS document in English Excel do the formulae just stop working‽
Tachibana Kanade@mattgrayyes @q I don’t have a non-English copy of Excel to hand to test with, but based on downloading an example German XLSX file, it seems that Excel uses the English names internally, localising and delocalising them for user interaction. So if I create a file with `=SUM` and give it to a German, their interface will show `=SUMME`. (This may also be related to why Excel always changes function names to be in all caps?)
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK@h0m54r @mattgrayyes @q when my employers first started using MS365 for some inexplicable reason (possibly due to downloading a language pack to check a Dutch document) I ended up with a desktop with English Office apps and a laptop in Dutch, so I had to use "=SUMIF" on one and =AANTAL.ALS on the other (although you generally could transfer the XLSX files between them without problems)
Tryst 🏴 
@q @mattgrayyes Incredible
@q @mattgrayyes wait, is this an XLS/XLSX difference or is this German website serving up English XLSX files?
Hans@q @mattgrayyes Are you sure? I thought they are localized on the fly; so when you open them in english Excel they show up as English.
I am pretty certain that I have seen this behavior before – although that might have been in Apple Pages.
lydia! is going to gpn23@mattgrayyes as an entity working in IT, yes, that is exactly what happens all the time at my company where I recently built a python script which translates english excel documents into german ones.
truly horrifying.
truly horrifying.
Kevin Karhan 
@mattgrayyes @q yes because Germany complies to Genevan Nomenclature on Maths!
fops@q this is the WORST, and aside from the names, in some locales the function argument separator is a comma and in some it's a semicolon
Mauser II
jet set ratio
Mike Cox
leckse@q@glauca.spaceuch It used to be much worse: Lotus 123, Multiplan and Excel (< 97) had localized keywords in their macro languages.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications#VBA_unter_Office_95