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It is quite fascinating that the localized Excel function names do not have some kind of internal reference/ID so a spreadsheet's language could simply be set b

• Someone 12y ago
  I think the problem with that is that Excel has a few 'almost like eval' functions. For example, SumIf takes a string like "> sin(2)". You would have to translate those strings at runtime, and may have to guess at the source language (that string might be input by the user) Even if that isn't the case, the engine cannot know whether any macro will change formulas. There, you hit the really troublesome area. VBA has a full eval (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff193019%28v=office.15%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff193019%28v=...). Even ignoring that, things can get hairy because Excel localizes numbers (is that comma a decimal point or a thousands separator?) and list separators (does one use commas or semicolons as argument separators?) I expect there are some edge cases here that makes this problem unsolvable in practice. Some people will have code that checks whether the string representation of a cell's value contains a comma to check whether it is >= 1000 (or <= -1000.00, but relatively, that is a 'minor' bug)