3 ms·

The comp I work for has half bought into the O365 thing. Most of us are on the semi-annual channel for desktop clients, a lucky few are on monthly no rhyme or r

by vxNsr 8y ago

The comp I work for has half bought into the O365 thing. Most of us are on the semi-annual channel for desktop clients, a lucky few are on monthly no rhyme or reason. And bec HQ is in EU they've decided to localize all web stuff to german. this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. Also for some reason they've chosen to keep flow and teams off by default, I can activate the free version of flow by going to it, but we don't get any of the powerBI integration we're already paying for. trying to explain the idiocy of this is like talking to 2000's era chatbot that can just assure it understands but doesn't really respond to any prompts.

petepete 8y ago
Impossible? You mean efficient.
- vxNsr 8y ago
  Nothing efficient about needing to learn german to rework a formula.
- abrugsch 8y ago
  The reality of the German efficiency myth is actually just lots and lots of bureaucracy. something you'd never truly appreciate until you try living there (as a foreigner no less) for more than a few months... (my cousin explained it to me with what they call it. Papierkreig. Literally "Paper war")
ascar 8y ago
> this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. It would be so much easier, if the us finally stopped using this middle-endian date format. It's logically flawed and too prone for misinterpretation. Further the US is the only country in the world to insist on using it. yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy are both fine (I actually prefer the first, though my country uses the latter) and logically consistent. While they are at it, they could also switch to the metric system.
- vxNsr 8y ago
  the dates issue is actually a little more confusing than you'd think because when entering the date online you need to enter it as dd/mm/yyyy but it will display as mm.dd.yyyy (did you catch that, they change the separator too). Re: formulas, they are all in german which means that unless I know the german equivalent word that microsoft chose, I can't make any modifications or even really write new formulas.
  - ascar 8y ago
    Actually Excel is smart here. It knows that Germany uses dots, but slashes are usually an indicator for the US. So you enter mm/dd/yyyy and it comes out as dd.mm.yyyy. (you see, you entered it flipped in your described experience). The easiest way for me is to enter it yyyy-mm-dd in a date formatted column and it will always catch the correct date. I feel the pain with the function names. I know some in German and some in English, because I just switched to the native language at some point. But the translations are easily findable in the web [1] and there is even a built in function translator tool [2]. [1] https://www.excel-function-translation.com/index.php?page=english-german.html https://www.excel-function-translation.com/index.php?page=en... [2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-translator-f262d0c0-991c-485b-89b6-32cc8d326889 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-tra...

by vxNsr 8y ago

petepete 8y ago

Impossible? You mean efficient.

vxNsr 8y ago
Nothing efficient about needing to learn german to rework a formula.
abrugsch 8y ago
The reality of the German efficiency myth is actually just lots and lots of bureaucracy. something you'd never truly appreciate until you try living there (as a foreigner no less) for more than a few months... (my cousin explained it to me with what they call it. Papierkreig. Literally "Paper war")

ascar 8y ago

> this makes entering dates or modifying formulas in excel online near impossible. It would be so much easier, if the us finally stopped using this middle-endian date format. It's logically flawed and too prone for misinterpretation. Further the US is the only country in the world to insist on using it. yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy are both fine (I actually prefer the first, though my country uses the latter) and logically consistent. While they are at it, they could also switch to the metric system.

vxNsr 8y ago
the dates issue is actually a little more confusing than you'd think because when entering the date online you need to enter it as dd/mm/yyyy but it will display as mm.dd.yyyy (did you catch that, they change the separator too). Re: formulas, they are all in german which means that unless I know the german equivalent word that microsoft chose, I can't make any modifications or even really write new formulas.
- ascar 8y ago
  Actually Excel is smart here. It knows that Germany uses dots, but slashes are usually an indicator for the US. So you enter mm/dd/yyyy and it comes out as dd.mm.yyyy. (you see, you entered it flipped in your described experience). The easiest way for me is to enter it yyyy-mm-dd in a date formatted column and it will always catch the correct date. I feel the pain with the function names. I know some in German and some in English, because I just switched to the native language at some point. But the translations are easily findable in the web [1] and there is even a built in function translator tool [2]. [1] https://www.excel-function-translation.com/index.php?page=english-german.html https://www.excel-function-translation.com/index.php?page=en... [2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-translator-f262d0c0-991c-485b-89b6-32cc8d326889 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/excel-functions-tra...