Maybe you can safely believe it was all just a nightmare... certainly sounds like one!

E.g. Excel does that still.

Yes. The best is when you get an Excel file from Japan and the formulas are in Japanese. Who needs encryption or obfuscation.

Probably someone manipulating with formulas with VBA and improperly using FormulaLocal property. Formulas are stored in language neutral way and it shouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances.

No? Formulas are stored in a language-independent way, you should see English formulas in that file.

The missing part of that story is probably the file is a .xlsm (or even an older .xls with macros) and therefore has VBA scripts, which is not saved in a language-independent way.

But is it Shit-JIS, or are you lucky enough to get UTF-8?

So obnoxious, although apparently in newer versions you can modify what language you want.

I remember seeing the dictionary to translate between German and English function names[1], one time I googled for "Excel German translation" and Google proudly showed the Translate interace pre-filled with "English: excel / German: übertreffen"

[1] https://www.perfectxl.com/excel-glossary/what-is-excel-funct...

The feature itself isn't that crazy – it's even a good thing, especially considering that Excel (and to lesser degree, VBA) were designed for ordinary people and that in the 80s/90s English was less common than it is today.

Where it went wrong is that as soon as you choose a language you were stuck with that. It should have been a display option.

VBA is still localized in many languages, I saw macros in italian. It's not just VBA keywords either, even excel functions are localized. e.g. this is from microsoft's docs[0]

    =CERCA.VERT(B2;C2:E7;3;VERO)

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/it-it/office/cercare-valori-co...