7 ms·

I just hate one single thing about Excel - all function names are localized - and in case of my native language - they are horrible and inconsistent.

kgwgk 7y ago
Even worse, the token used to separate arguments is localized. So you may have to use semicolons instead of commas. But in some places you need to pass a string representation of a formula and there Excel will only understand the non-localized commas. Fun all around!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 7y ago
  I once had a contracting gig where I was tasked with updating a bunch of Word BASIC macros (this was Office 95 days...) used to maintain the ISO 9001 documentation for a major company. Problem was the original version was written in their Danish office, and whoever wrote it had handed it to the Norwegian office exported as text before he left, and they'd imported it and started munging it and adding lots of stuff before someone bothered to try running it and realized it was completely broken. I wish I'd dug more into how they'd managed to get themselves into a situation where they'd significantly modified the code before trying to run it even once... Version control? What is version control? So they had this broken version that had some Danish keywords with a bunch of Norwegian updates, that they didn't want to just re-import into a Danish version and copy over properly in a tokenized form and having to try to identify and re-apply the Norwegian updates. So I got the fun job of properly translating it and figuring out what the new code was meant to do and make it do it in the process, with no access to any of the people who had worked on it. [it is worth pointing out that this was an office for several hundred staff of a major international company that developed large scale information systems for things like police departments; while version control wasn't everywhere in the mid 90's, a large systems integrator certainly ought to be using it... Particularly amusing that it was their ISO 9001 documentation that was being handled in such a haphazard manner; happy to have never been a customer of theirs, though] The task was extra "fun" for certain values of fun, because unlike, say, English vs Norwegian, or English vs Danish, Danish and Norwegian are close enough that 80% of the time a term from the Danish version might look right and be valid Norwegian, but the odds seemed to be (and maybe my memory is exaggerating it due to my lasting memory of extended pain) about 50/50 that the Norwegian translator of Word BASIC had chosen a different function name to the Danish translator for no good reason. Or there were slight, hard to spot, spelling differences. And sometimes what looked like a mistake was a function defined locally. I spent a couple of weeks reading through the whole thing and mostly rewriting code that could have been written from scratch in a couple of days if they'd just told me what the end result was meant to be instead of dumping a pile of non-functioning code on me. But I guess I was cheap compared to their regular staff back then. It was how I learned Word BASIC (I'd taken the contract, figuring it'd be easy to pick up, so I told the recruiter that sure I knew it, on the basis that I certainly knew a couple of variants of BASIC). Never to use it again (at it was replaced by a Visual Basic variant a few years later anyway)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
qwerty456127 7y ago
+1000. This is ridiculous. Couldn't they at least make this optional so you'd be able to switch this off somewhere in the configuration dialog, registry or command line? I hate localized apps altogether (who even needs localized Visual Studio srsly? I can't believe anybody can be competent in a .Net programming language and relevant frameworks and practices without being able to read English) but localizning some apps makes some sense for some people, nevertheless localizing functions feels beyond reason. I feel thankful they didn't localize C# and command line commands :-)
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > who even needs localized Visual Studio srsly? What's not to like on Oracle's localized error messages that you can't google because all the documentation is in English? Even more because some on my language omit useless words like the equivalents of "not" or "can't".
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Sounds like this is being done on purpose to sell more support services and to hinder international migration of specialists.
franga2000 7y ago
While I haven't encountered localized names, localized formats make Excel an absolute pain for me. My language uses the "European" number format of a comma for decimals and periods for thousands separators. Excel tries to adjust to that by using semicolons for argument separators (i.e. ADD(1.5, 3.5) -> ADD(1,5; 3,5)). The problem is that their locale detection is wildly inconsistent and there isn't a good way to override it without changing system settings. When moving a file between computers, this is an utter disaster.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  Excel goes one step further, and assumes that users in some locales (e.g., Dutch) want semicolons as separators in every CSV file you open in Excel. I don't care (I just use LibreOffice Calc, which accepts any delimited values file just fine, and just asks which separator to assume), but it means that when you develop an option for users to download some statistical data as comma-separated values file (which is easy to generate), that you now have a problem if that user wants to open it in Excel (which makes sense for CSV) and that user is using one of Excel's broken locales (e.g., Dutch) where comma-separated values are not understood (again, it wants semicolons in Dutch). I.e., the expected file format changes because of the locale Excel uses! So where someone in the US can just double click the CSV file (not to mention anyone using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc anywhere in the world), someone using Excel in the Netherlands will just get a spreadsheet where every line consists of that whole line of values stuffed into column A.
  - Grumbledour 7y ago
    And that's not even the worst. You can teach people the few buttons necessary to read in the text, but once they save it again, the file is changed! Now you have a different separator and chances are good, excel also mangled date columns, removed leading zeros from numbers and switched out decimal separators! So you may not be able to further process the file. And its also sad, because if they just made some of these changes optional, excel would be a good tool to quickly work on an csv file and pass it on. But as is, I am always hesitant to work with csv in excel, because it mostly breaks and becomes unusable for further processing.
coldtea 7y ago
Don't use the localized version of Excel in general. Problem solved.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
  In a corporate environment you normally don’t get to choose that.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    You should.
- baq 7y ago
  tell that to enterprise IT.
ekingr 7y ago
The worst of it is that there are some very specific (and undocumented) edge cases where the translation won't be done properly. It create very 'fun' to debug issues where a spreadsheet would work in a French Excel and not in an English one. (For instance if you use the "Row-Column" cell reference, in English it is `R1C1` while in French `L1C1` - and it won't translate)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
psychoslave 7y ago
Make a new locale :)

kgwgk 7y ago

Even worse, the token used to separate arguments is localized. So you may have to use semicolons instead of commas. But in some places you need to pass a string representation of a formula and there Excel will only understand the non-localized commas. Fun all around!

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 7y ago
I once had a contracting gig where I was tasked with updating a bunch of Word BASIC macros (this was Office 95 days...) used to maintain the ISO 9001 documentation for a major company. Problem was the original version was written in their Danish office, and whoever wrote it had handed it to the Norwegian office exported as text before he left, and they'd imported it and started munging it and adding lots of stuff before someone bothered to try running it and realized it was completely broken. I wish I'd dug more into how they'd managed to get themselves into a situation where they'd significantly modified the code before trying to run it even once... Version control? What is version control? So they had this broken version that had some Danish keywords with a bunch of Norwegian updates, that they didn't want to just re-import into a Danish version and copy over properly in a tokenized form and having to try to identify and re-apply the Norwegian updates. So I got the fun job of properly translating it and figuring out what the new code was meant to do and make it do it in the process, with no access to any of the people who had worked on it. [it is worth pointing out that this was an office for several hundred staff of a major international company that developed large scale information systems for things like police departments; while version control wasn't everywhere in the mid 90's, a large systems integrator certainly ought to be using it... Particularly amusing that it was their ISO 9001 documentation that was being handled in such a haphazard manner; happy to have never been a customer of theirs, though] The task was extra "fun" for certain values of fun, because unlike, say, English vs Norwegian, or English vs Danish, Danish and Norwegian are close enough that 80% of the time a term from the Danish version might look right and be valid Norwegian, but the odds seemed to be (and maybe my memory is exaggerating it due to my lasting memory of extended pain) about 50/50 that the Norwegian translator of Word BASIC had chosen a different function name to the Danish translator for no good reason. Or there were slight, hard to spot, spelling differences. And sometimes what looked like a mistake was a function defined locally. I spent a couple of weeks reading through the whole thing and mostly rewriting code that could have been written from scratch in a couple of days if they'd just told me what the end result was meant to be instead of dumping a pile of non-functioning code on me. But I guess I was cheap compared to their regular staff back then. It was how I learned Word BASIC (I'd taken the contract, figuring it'd be easy to pick up, so I told the recruiter that sure I knew it, on the basis that I certainly knew a couple of variants of BASIC). Never to use it again (at it was replaced by a Visual Basic variant a few years later anyway)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

qwerty456127 7y ago

+1000. This is ridiculous. Couldn't they at least make this optional so you'd be able to switch this off somewhere in the configuration dialog, registry or command line? I hate localized apps altogether (who even needs localized Visual Studio srsly? I can't believe anybody can be competent in a .Net programming language and relevant frameworks and practices without being able to read English) but localizning some apps makes some sense for some people, nevertheless localizing functions feels beyond reason. I feel thankful they didn't localize C# and command line commands :-)

marcosdumay 7y ago
> who even needs localized Visual Studio srsly? What's not to like on Oracle's localized error messages that you can't google because all the documentation is in English? Even more because some on my language omit useless words like the equivalents of "not" or "can't".
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Sounds like this is being done on purpose to sell more support services and to hinder international migration of specialists.

franga2000 7y ago

While I haven't encountered localized names, localized formats make Excel an absolute pain for me. My language uses the "European" number format of a comma for decimals and periods for thousands separators. Excel tries to adjust to that by using semicolons for argument separators (i.e. ADD(1.5, 3.5) -> ADD(1,5; 3,5)). The problem is that their locale detection is wildly inconsistent and there isn't a good way to override it without changing system settings. When moving a file between computers, this is an utter disaster.

Freak_NL 7y ago
Excel goes one step further, and assumes that users in some locales (e.g., Dutch) want semicolons as separators in every CSV file you open in Excel. I don't care (I just use LibreOffice Calc, which accepts any delimited values file just fine, and just asks which separator to assume), but it means that when you develop an option for users to download some statistical data as comma-separated values file (which is easy to generate), that you now have a problem if that user wants to open it in Excel (which makes sense for CSV) and that user is using one of Excel's broken locales (e.g., Dutch) where comma-separated values are not understood (again, it wants semicolons in Dutch). I.e., the expected file format changes because of the locale Excel uses! So where someone in the US can just double click the CSV file (not to mention anyone using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc anywhere in the world), someone using Excel in the Netherlands will just get a spreadsheet where every line consists of that whole line of values stuffed into column A.
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  And that's not even the worst. You can teach people the few buttons necessary to read in the text, but once they save it again, the file is changed! Now you have a different separator and chances are good, excel also mangled date columns, removed leading zeros from numbers and switched out decimal separators! So you may not be able to further process the file. And its also sad, because if they just made some of these changes optional, excel would be a good tool to quickly work on an csv file and pass it on. But as is, I am always hesitant to work with csv in excel, because it mostly breaks and becomes unusable for further processing.

coldtea 7y ago

Don't use the localized version of Excel in general. Problem solved.

ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
In a corporate environment you normally don’t get to choose that.
- coldtea 7y ago
  You should.
baq 7y ago
tell that to enterprise IT.

ekingr 7y ago

The worst of it is that there are some very specific (and undocumented) edge cases where the translation won't be done properly. It create very 'fun' to debug issues where a spreadsheet would work in a French Excel and not in an English one. (For instance if you use the "Row-Column" cell reference, in English it is `R1C1` while in French `L1C1` - and it won't translate)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

psychoslave 7y ago

Make a new locale :)