Hacker News Reader

Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

The one thing that drives me crazy about Excel is that function names are localized. So if you use the German version you'll have to use "SUMME" instead of "SUM" etc. this is really annoying and I wish there was a way to always use the English word. I'd love to talk to the person who made the decision that this was a good idea. In the CAS tool Rhino, you can always do _command to use an English command even in localized versions...wouldn't be that hard to provide this feature.

View on HN

Excel is for end users. Not every Microsoft customer speaks English.

But you don't have to speak English to use sum() to sum values. You only have to know the language of Excel, in which sum() means adding things together.

I never understood this argument. To use a function you have to look up its name anyway*, so what does it matter which language inspired the name? I wouldn't mind if sum() was known as hezrtsh() as long as it was consistently so, I could have a chance of learning it.

----

* I still sometimes struggle to remember if it's average() or mean() and whether it's count() or length() -- different programming environments use different names. So even as an English speaker, I have to look up the word for each specific programming environment.

I never knew Excel localized function names. If I have an xlsx that uses a German-localized function like SUMME, will it error out when ran on an English-localized machine? Since they can localize function names, effectively mapping (presumably) English function names to characters in each supported language, shouldn't an inverse function be feasible? One that would map SUMME to SUM, or some other unique identifier?

Under normal circumstances it gets mapped to the right localised variant when the sheet is opened on a different machine. So on your own machine you see and enter the things you're used to. The issues come when working on someone else's machine, or when that automatic process fails for some reason -- a friend of mine sometimes runs into that, where it just inexplicably... doesn't.

I am also annoyed by this and just resort to an all English office installation most times. However, for the office user market it is a clear advantage. This way anyone can pick up the tool and discover.

It works 99,9% of the time.

There are few obscure functions that have parameters and those parameters can come in home language - so they will stop working. Also there are some issues with charts.

In general Excel is made for corporations and people from different countries send each other files all the time.

However it would be nice to be able to dynamically switch language. There are few websites that translates formulas.

I don't know about these days, but I implemented an XLS reader 20 years ago.

The cell formulas were actually stored in Reverse Polish Notation with each function represented as a number. The actual ASCII you entered was never stored anywhere.

It's probably the most interesting and amusing file format detail I ever stumbled upon.

AFAIK Excel functions do not really-really have a "name".

The name you type in - say - a German version is saved as a "function number" on file.

When the file is opened in - still say - an English version, these "function numbers" are rendered as the English names.

Sometime in the 90’s, even VBA keywords were localized.

Yes, this happened in Excel 5/95. The first version with VBA in addition to Excel 4.0-Macros. By the way, Excel 4.0-Macros were also localized. The backlash was nearly immediate because localized xls-files were not always interchangeable. Support for localized VBA was removed in Excel 97.

English is not universal, that's the main reasoning for that. You would be amazed during the decade of "Internationalization" it was the main talking points of every magazines and computer shows.

They should support both spellings, and a file saved in germany should work in france.

> English is not universal

I think only because Excel is not, at its core, a programming tool.

For programming languages, English is universal. You are pretty much forced to learn English in order to take your first programming steps, and -- as a non-native speaker -- I find this is a good thing. This way, we have a lingua franca of programming.

It's not because of a particular love of English. It is what it is. I would have welcomed French or Italian or whatever had it been the lingua franca instead. I would probably NOT have welcomed Japanese or Chinese written with ideograms because those writing systems are completely extraneous and hard to match for my Western brain, but anything else is fair game.

A "Tower of Babel" situation would be the worst.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com