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There’s open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv expo

There’s open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv exports were super dumb and listed price columns as strings with the unit symbol as opposed to just the number. So i split the string and casted to number on my ooo calc (in english), but the casting didnt work on his french ooo calc. I spend the next 40 minutes trying to find the god damn function in french. It was surprisingly hard !! But eventually we figured it out (was and i forgot the casting function both in french and english as i never use calc/excel). So ooo calc vba equivalent is translated in various languages ;p

Moru 7y ago
Yes, that has been a constant confusion for me since they started translating office. Why would you translate commands to another language?
- jobigoud 7y ago
  I think it's supposed to be more like a DSL, aimed at non-programmers. So it may make sense to translate something like "Average", if you don't expect your target users to know english. Not as stupid as translating low level error messages.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    But it should be a presentation thing. The formulas stored in the file should be the same regardless of language. There's no good reason not to.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Yep, same in Excel. And as a Spanish Excel user, I can attest it's a pain. If you find a solution for a nontrivial Excel problem online, chances are it will be in English. Then, you need to manually translate function names to Spanish to make it work in Spanish Excel. Translations are often non-obvious (average is PROMEDIO, not MEDIA? really?). While I understand localization can be useful for a subset of users, at least they could have made the English function names also work, or have a suggestion mechanism to suggest the Spanish translation if you type an English function name. I don't understand why they don't do this. Anyway, the problems of name localization are nothing compared to the problems of using commas as decimal separator. People from English-speaking countries will never know how many extra hours of life they have from not fiddling with decimal separators, text encoding programming issues, etc.
- phkahler 7y ago
  I would hope Excel could convert all the built in functions by changing a language setting somewhere. The problem you describe should have been the first thing to come up when they decided to localize it.
usrusr 7y ago
One of the early sins of office file formats, translating formula symbols not just in presentation but right down in the persistent form. If memory serves me right, back when MS Office macro viruses were the threat du jour, there was already a bit of a remedy in place for those formats that would translate the formulas and macros of incoming files from a different language version of the same software. This caused secondary waves of "mutated" viruses that had crossed multiple language barriers and came back slightly different but still working, foiling the efforts of checksum based virus scanners.

Moru 7y ago

Yes, that has been a constant confusion for me since they started translating office. Why would you translate commands to another language?

jobigoud 7y ago
I think it's supposed to be more like a DSL, aimed at non-programmers. So it may make sense to translate something like "Average", if you don't expect your target users to know english. Not as stupid as translating low level error messages.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  But it should be a presentation thing. The formulas stored in the file should be the same regardless of language. There's no good reason not to.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

Yep, same in Excel. And as a Spanish Excel user, I can attest it's a pain. If you find a solution for a nontrivial Excel problem online, chances are it will be in English. Then, you need to manually translate function names to Spanish to make it work in Spanish Excel. Translations are often non-obvious (average is PROMEDIO, not MEDIA? really?). While I understand localization can be useful for a subset of users, at least they could have made the English function names also work, or have a suggestion mechanism to suggest the Spanish translation if you type an English function name. I don't understand why they don't do this. Anyway, the problems of name localization are nothing compared to the problems of using commas as decimal separator. People from English-speaking countries will never know how many extra hours of life they have from not fiddling with decimal separators, text encoding programming issues, etc.

phkahler 7y ago
I would hope Excel could convert all the built in functions by changing a language setting somewhere. The problem you describe should have been the first thing to come up when they decided to localize it.

usrusr 7y ago

One of the early sins of office file formats, translating formula symbols not just in presentation but right down in the persistent form. If memory serves me right, back when MS Office macro viruses were the threat du jour, there was already a bit of a remedy in place for those formats that would translate the formulas and macros of incoming files from a different language version of the same software. This caused secondary waves of "mutated" viruses that had crossed multiple language barriers and came back slightly different but still working, foiling the efforts of checksum based virus scanners.