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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization!

I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir").

I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc., not important.

(FWIW native Windows Excel didn't have this issue, so I sticked with native Excel).

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Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.

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> ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir").

Just nitpicking, but "g" stands for "gras", a literal translation of "bold" in the context of typography.

> I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions

And that's why assigning users to specific services/servers/translations depending on IP is the worst kind of evil. Please let us choose the language consciously in a menu, or respect our browser settings: whatever our shit ISPs are doing behind the scenes should not impact our browsing, and no, IP addresses don't have a "country" and the simple fact that you need to use 3rd party databases (geoIP etc) is proof of that and just how stupid the whole concept is.

Nitpicking your nitpick: “gras” means “fat” and, only in a typographical context, “bold”.

> no, IP addresses don't have a "country"

But, but, IP ranges have a “country” field in the RIPE database!

[Just pointing out it’s a mostly-right (aka subtly-wrong) solution that seems like a really good and straightforward idea at first (sufficiently ignorant) glance.]

Google sheets also does this and even uses regional formatting standards. I can't copy values between programs because some are using ',' for decimals and some are using '.' its VERY annoying

Maybe we need a locale-neutral separator for these things. Then we'll have three conflicting options.

I always get this wrong in calculators. I type , where I should have typed . or vice versa, and get a completely wrong result.

Regarding Excel: Watch out with multi language setups! I was working with an English iPhone, an English Windows PC and a Swiss German Mac on an Excel file stored on One Drive. Editing sometimes in Excel and sometimes in Excel Online.

Result: Broken data due to SUM/SUMME/etc formulas, broken phone number recognition and (worst) broken dates.

What a mess!

And broken CSV files.

In some European locales Excel switches from importing/exporting Comma Separated Values to Semicolon Separated Values with comma acting as the decimal point.

I'm also victim of this.

It can be fix if you do import from file and then manually select separator.

But this was need to be done every. single. time.

For me the worst is that these settings sometimes reset after background updates... I don't know how many times I've tried to do a simple aggregation or something in Excel and was flustered by why it didn't work, only to finally figure out that my skripting language was set to german instead of English... Yes, the actual commands are also language specific.

Swiss German here. Je suis bilingue. My OS is set to English with a Swiss German keyboard layout. This works fine everywhere. Except: The Microsoft Store app just keeps on running in French with English content. No German to be found. It looks damn silly.

I think this explains why my old computer was so confused about languages. The windows apps were in Finnish, system settings etc. were in English. Then some parts of Google stuff were in Turkish, some in Finnish, and some others were in English. Every now and then some random app would appear and surprise me in Turkish. It was truly impossible to tell what language would appear after each click.

It was originally running windows 7 with English as the system language. Some software were installed while I was in Turkey, some (including windows 10 upgrade) were installed after I moved to Finland. Now I’m learning that my computer couldn’t handle this gracefully :)

Hey, I had the same issue and variations of it (french category titles, german content and english menus). Also Swiss German with English setup. I actually managed to solve it with some unintuitive language settings.

// Edit:

Okay so the issue can be resolved as follows (Windows 10): Windows Settings -> Time & Language -> Language -> Preferred Languages -> Order it so that "English (United States)" is at the top

I previsouly had "English (Switzerland)" at the top. This order influences the "Apps & websites" setting at the top there.

With "English (Switzerland)" my section headings in the Store were French, e.g. "Films et TV" but with "English (United States)" at the top I get "Movies & TV". Of course the section headings, callouts, etc. otherwise are still a mixture of your MS Store region (German in my case) and the Windows display language (English in my case).

Why "English (Switzerland)" would result in French... I don't know.

> language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization!

Maybe this is due to the fact that Excel documents break if you change language, as function names are localized?

> I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.

Sometimes my IP resolves close enough to the Röstigraben[^1] that I will get sites in German despite having my browser set to English (GB) and OS set to French.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Röstigraben

> Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.

Yep that’s a super fun one in all multilingual or small countries (where you might be geoloc’d in a separate linguistic community, or a country with a rather different culture).

> language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization!

That doesn't seem to always be the case.

I work in France, all my IPs are identified as being from France, the company is purely French and doesn't use English at all, yet all my Office applications are in English. I'm using Firefox on Linux, in English.

The only one exception is Teams, because for some reason spelling is tied to the UI interface, so I chose for it to be in French, but the default was for it to be in English.

This is very annoying for me too! I am North American, but work for a European company, and my Windows and Office locale settings are all screwed up, and consistency reset themselves whenever I try to fix it.

The beauty of AD user profiles.

I am Swiss German and living in Switzerland (German speaking part) and I had the weirdest issue for a couple of years: Swiss, the airline, always gave me french boarding passes. But all my settings were either set to English or German. The bizarre part was that if I booked for multiple people they would all get english ones except for me. Similar things sometimes happen for other services. Sometimes Switzerland means French for some services and all my settings on any level do not help.

And docs.microsoft.com pulls the language unchangably from the location: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/feedback/issues/462

It's so annoying. There is an option to change the language, however I have to change it every time I search for something, because the language doesn't get saved

And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.

In Germanic countries, it’s common to write numbers like 1.234,56 instead of the anglo standard of 1,234.56. Not just on paper, but also digitally. So a value in excel or a CSV is now 1234,56 instead of 1234.56. As result, CSV needs to use ; instead of , as separator

Which is why TSV exists, because the tab character is universal.

I don't really care about what kind of punctuation Germanic countries are using, which I am not using, avoiding ambiguity in the first place.

My software, including my browser, and my operating system is usually set to English, and I expect spreadsheet (data!) applications to not interpret whatever they want (based on IP address or location of companies or whatever), but actually interpret according to a standard. It is ridiculous for a spreadsheet application reading CSV (C! as in Comma!) to interpret the comma as a visual number decoration, instead of according to format, as a separator of cells.

The CSV "standard" is from 2005. Using ; as separator was common in germanic countries for decades before the standard was even written (and CSV was commonly understood as character separated values there).

You can’t easily redefine an existing standard just because you don’t like what everyone else has been doing for the past few decades.

As said, use TSV, which has been standardized for much longer, if you want compatibility.

It's bound to the version of office you buy. IIRC there are some hacks which let you change it.

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