excel web app function language

Question

Hi,

When using the excel webapp, all menu's are in English, but excel functions are in dutch. I also want these functions to b in English. Where can I change this?

Kindr regards,

Bart.

Answer 1

Request to separate Location/Region from language. I wish to edit Excel in English (with English formula names), even if i do not live in USA/UK,... In the desktop version, this works perfectly; in the WebApp version, MS infers language from location. This is poor practice.

-EM

Answer 2

Somehow related to this subject, formulas are in Dutch when the location  is 'Belgium' and the only way to change this is to change the country. A shame when about 40% of Belgians are French-speaking ! So yes, please link the language used for formulas to the language setting, not the location ! Moreover, I don't see why someone would like to have the UI in one language and the formulas in another one.

Answer 3

Hi,

I do believe the above statement is wrong, the Country/region setting in the Microsoft account will change Caption/menu/button text, but not the formula language.

From other threads it is stated the formula language follows the region setting in the Windows environment. What exact setting is determining the formula language of Excel Web App?

I always run Windows/Office in English language since the Norwegian translation of MS products are so utterly poor and unintuitive, but keeps the Norwegian time/date/number formatting.  I also use a Norwegian keyboard layout, necessary for the extra characters. I get the feeling that it will not be possible in the Web Apps to keep the whole UI of the Web apps in one language (English), and allow for local date/number/keyboard configuration. Please explicitly state this, if it is not possible to achieve at current. Will save many of us time, rather than searching for solutions that is simply not there.

Thanks,

T

Answer 4

Hello David,

Thanks for clearing up this issue for other users. A similar issue came up for me with Turkish menus, and I found my way to this thread and your answer via search engine.

I work at a market where we manage lots of bilingual Turkish and English documents, which I have recently had to edit using the Excel Web App. It's quite a pain to switch my region back and forth from Turkey/Turkish to US/English when going between documents, and it would be very useful to be able to customize this setting in each document. If you could add this functionality, it would make my life a lot easier.

Thanks,

Deniz MacLeod

Answer 5

Your regional settings are derived from the "Account Settings" section of your Microsoft Account.  From SkyDrive, you can click your name in the top right, then click Account Settings.  Clicking "Edit Personal Info" takes you to a page that lists your Country/Region.

If you want different regional settings today, you must change this Country/Region setting for your Microsoft account.

For most people in most scenarios, this setting does provide the locale information they expect based on their country or region in which they live.  However, there are scenarios such as these where more granular control is desired.  In this case all data is rendered according to your regional settings, and UI/menus are rendered according to your language settings.  Formulas happen to be part of the data, and so they are rendering according to your regional settings.

While we can't comment on future features, Microsoft appreciates and is interested in your feedback.  Does changing your Country/Region work for you?  Do you expect another configuration option to manage your regional settings?  Or would more formatting options in the web app solve your problem?