Try to use the French version of Excel, and you'll understand. They renamed function names. Everyting. Not a single word makes sense anymore.

Larger issue is that Excel formula language has different separator characters depending on the locale. This would not be that bad if this would be case only for presentation in UI (.xls contains parse tree and .xlsx AFAIK always contains en_US syntax), but this difference is even in the format of CSV files processed by excel (there is significant portion of the world, where the C in CSV stands for semiColon, as far as excel is concerned)

I switched the language of the OS on my computer for this very reason. This is idiotic.

Wait, really? As in '=somme(A1:A10)' to add a column?

Yes, same in Italian, and I guess in every other language. It's dreadful but probably once you memorized all your favourite functions is quick to use. It's definitely not a tool for developers.

People have asked for this or the Spanish version of Angular or Russian Java. If I only spoke those languages I might want that as well. Surprised no one has tried to introduce this into popular programming languages.

The times when this was decided are remote in terms of computing. We're probably talking about mid-eighties. Excel is an office tool, and probably most of its users work in offices where not a single word of English is spoken, ever. So I don't think it was "asked by the users" but rather what's expected from a basic office tool, to be localised in your language.

That's expected of Excel, Excel is an office tool and not designed for software engineers, a lot of its users don't understand English.