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Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

There were localized versions of Visual Basic for Applications in Office 95, at least there was a German one. I had the "pleasure" to use it once, and I can tell you it was no pleasure at all. The first problem was that for some keywords there is no obvious translation (for example "if" can be translated to "falls" or "wenn"), so I had to look up the keywords again and again. Then of course it wasn't easily possible to transfer code snippets from English VBA projects, so everything had to be converted (by hand at that time). And for some reason certain keywords were not localized at all (for example 'DIM'). Turned out the whole localization was a horrible idea.

Here is a piece of code in German VBA for Excel 95: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications?...

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This is the bane of my existence when working with Excel. I'm spending too much time figuring out that "RAND" (which is what you'd find in search) is "ZUFALLSZAHL" in German Excel (which I use at work) and "ALEATORIO" in Spanish (which I use at home).

Is this on VBA or for formulas too?

It is for spreadsheet functions, VBA is English only, but there are anyway some quirks, as an example inside VBA the decimal point (separator) is actually a point whilst /as an example in Italian) the decimal separator is a comma, and this creates often the need to convert back and forth the numbers.

JFYI, what I often do for those functions I am not already familiar with both in Italian and English (it doesn't work for really all functions) is to use the English original I find in (the English version of) Spread32 (an extremely small Excel compatible program):

http://www.byedesign.co.uk/

then save the worksheet and re-open it with the Italian Excel, since the functions are actually saved internally as an "ordinal" (or whatever) and interpreted by Excel in its "local" language.

Yeah, the translated VB functions in Excel are a nightmare, especially when one works in a multi-lingual workplace. If you haven't heard finns complain about things being in Swedish before, then I can recommend handing them an excel-sheet with the VB code in Swedish and watch the chaos unfold. :D

Not function related but I work in a very international org and when excel traverses international boundaries you get strange effects.

Changing some accented characters in a well known brand name into strange ones used in "obscure Serb Croat religious documents

As I remember, they had also localised symbolic "constants" so a format spec fed to (some date function) was 'dd/mm/yyyy' for english locale, but 'gg/mm/aaaa' for the italian one . God help you if you had (I did) some combination of - say - English Excel and italian OS (as I remember you got english function names but italian 'constants' as in DATEFORMAT('gg/mm/aaaa'...) with nonsens errors if you used 'dd/mm/yyyy').

An asinine idea indeed.

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