Excel for Mac (Office 365) refuses to use regional settings from Mac OS 14.1

Question

I want my Mac language to be US English, as that is what I am used to. I live in Denmark, so my regional settings, like thousand and decimal separators, date formats etc. are set differently. Excel for Mac (latest version, 16.79.1) does not seem to respect the regional settings from my Mac. Instead, it uses the Language, which is US English. For example, if I enter "5/7" in a cell - Excel interprets it as May 7. I want it to interpret it according to my regional settings, so 5/7 should be interpreted as 5th of July. Is it a bug in Excel for Mac, that it sets regional settings, based on Language, rather than the regional settings chosen in the operating system?

Answer 1

With the macOS regional setting "English (US)" the system and Excel don't agree on how to read the environment locale, and then Excel uses its defaults instead. With regional setting set to "English (UK)" the system is OK, as you have experienced.

Referring to this post, https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-releases-macos-sonoma-14-1.2408652/page-5?post=32666688#post-32666688, you can check your setting using the command

defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale

If the output is something messed up like en_US@rg=dkzzzz, you can override the setting with the command:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_DK

(assuming you want the English (US) - Danish combo indicated in your screenshot)

Answer 2

Thanks for the heads-up Hans. I did update the system and it lost the AppleLocale setting I'd made. I came back here to copy and paste the commands. I did so from my own post above, and noticed a small but important mistake in my post. I'd written:

write .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_DK

It should have been:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_DK

I edited and corrected my previous post.

Answer 3

You do know this is a users-help-users community forum? That this is not Microsoft support?

Answer 4

I did an experiment. (macOS Sonoma 14.5, Excel 16.85)

With the regional settings as shown:

I get

Excel:

Swift Playgrounds:

Command line:

defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale

en_US@rg=dkzzzz

Changing the regional settings as shown

gives

Excel (restarted):

Swift Playgrounds:

Command line:

defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale

en_DK  

My conclusion: Microsoft Excel does not read the locale settings as it is supposed. (Sorry for the large images - I do not know how to scale them here)

Answer 5

I really want to chime in with my thanks for the solution to this very annoying problem.

However, I am left wondering: Is the fault on Apple or on Microsofts side?

If I interpret the commands correctly, it seems the system preferences window does not actually apply the Region-choice correctly.

Shouldn't this be flagged with MacOS developers?