It still is that way. And whats even more maddening: you have to replace the commas in the formulas with semicolons. Probably because the comma is used in numbers in Dutch. It has driven me nuts more than once though!

I think there would be a compromise in making if US gave up imperial units and Europe would give up the decimal comma. Or at least I would like that kind of compromise. The next hurdle would be to all agree to use ISO date format...

You have my vote. Then again, I am the kind of person who sets up their phone in English because I dislike translations.

Indeed, that's one problem I had with it recently—with formulas. I search the web on how to do some thing, and then have to stare at the list of functions to find the same ones in my language. Doesn't help that functions are named like it's the 80s, with arbitrary abbreviations.

That's still the case today.

I presume this is the ‘legacy’ macro language and there is also the Visual Basic thing which is plain English, right?

I am talking about the formula language you're using in spreadsheets for calculations etc, I don't think that is legacy. I don't think I know anyone using the Visual Basic thing, I actually thought that's not part of Excel anymore except for compatibility support, but yes I guess Visual Basic stays in English.