Localization in Excel

My native tongue is Danish. Being a software developer has naturally forced English upon me and in my daily work I prefer using software/websites running English only (with a few exceptions).

For a couple of years I have been using Excel on both my home computer (English setup) and on my work computer (Danish setup) and a couple of times I’ve had Excel files shared between them. I am surely admiring the fact that every part of Excel seems to have been localized! It is amazing!

When a number or formula is typed into a field in Excel it is typed using the current locale. The files saved containing localized numbers and formulas is opened on a different computer running Excel under a different locale with absolutely no problem.

Consider the following example:

This example uses the “FLOOR” function on a decimal – both localized – the function is called “AFRUND.GULV” and the decimal is using the regular Danish separator (comma). When this file saved it can be shared with every (compatible) version of Excel running any locale imaginable and it just works!

All the new Office formats are just ZIP files containing (primarily) XML files. So I took a look inside the one just saved – and this is what it contained:

The content of the cells is actually the non-localized version of numbers and/or functions – which leads to the conclusion that the localization is simply a layer of abstraction inside the UI and all typed localized strings are converted back and forth all the time.

In my opinion this is actually quite amazing. The complexity of localized elements the user is able to throw together inside an Excel document makes this localization task a big one – very big! In ABC Analyzer we let the user create new columns in their data using formulas – much the same way as Excel – but the level of customization isn’t nearly as high as in Excel. Making our formulas and functions appear localized would be a nightmare – I am quite sure I will never (willingly) go down that road!