[jasonthorsness]

The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.

[shagie]

> but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language

There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)

Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.

[OoooooooO]

Change the language of your Windows system to anything but English and then open your Excel file with formulas again.

[hidd]

When I worked at a university's tech support, this was a recurring problem. People made grade lists in Excel, then imported them into the digital learning environment, which occasionally was set to a different language. This meant that the decimal point would be disregarded, and e.g. an 8.5/10 would be imported as an 85 (which got clamped to 10). Maximum grades for everyone, confused students and teachers :')

[tstenner]

Even better: grades range from 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (failed) with partial grades (.3, .7) in-between. Caused a few problems when a 1.3 got interpreted as the first May and converted to the number of days between the epoch and the first ofay of that year.

[NooneAtAll3]

I don't get your point

programming languages aren't allowed to be in non-english somehow?

[mmooss]

ok, what happens? (I'm not messing around on my system right now ...)

[shrx]

Localization of formulas. On my system, all parameter-separating commas have to be replaced with semicolons.

[mmooss]

That is shocking. Excel is used by every international organization, probably. How do they manage the localization?

[phinnaeus]

Maybe the files store the formulas in an intermediate format that can be localized by the client

[KellyCriterion]

Classic one++ (-:

[lmz]

It even has LAMBDA now: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...

[Bridged7756]

Yup. Not too long ago they added Python scripting. Definitely beats the weird cloud scripting you have to do with Google Sheets.

[HPsquared]

Excel Python runs in the cloud. It is nicely integrated though.

[NetMageSCW]

I wish they had gone for embedding .Net locally instead.