Formula Incompatibilities Between US and Japanese Versions of Excel

[StevenHB]

I'm responsible for creating a number of Excel-based tools for use by co-workers, most of whom are based in the US. There's one in Japan, however, who periodically experiences tool problems because of differences between the US and Japanese versions of Excel. Most recently, there was a formula that used the Datevalue and Weekday functions that failed. I don't know what caused the failure.

Can anyone provide me with some guidance on what tends to be problematic between the two versions? I've Googled and not found anything helpful.

 

[DonkeyOte]

Dates predominantly - a string which can be evaluated as a DATE on one locale might not be on another, eg:

=DATEVALUE("September 23, 2010")

would return a Date Serial on a client running US regional settings but would return an error value on a client running UK regional settings

On a related note - you would also experience issues were you to use variable identifiers in terms of constants, eg:

=TEXT(A1,"dd-mmm")

Though the function name & delimiter will translate as necessary the constants within the function would not - and so the above applied to a client running say a French regional settings would fail given dd-mmm are not the correct identifiers.

In short - though there are ways around some of these issues it can be difficult to create something that will work universally - esp. when it comes to date string conversions.

Another area which can be affected is where formulae are designed to work off the format of another cell though this practice is rare.

The above are just a few examples that come to mind.

 

[StevenHB]

Thank you. I took a guess and switched from using datevalue() to date(). I learned late last night from the user that his change was successful.

I appreciate the lesson.