Why you should use Excel in English?

During my career in several companies (Polish or international) I met with different approaches to working in Excel. Most of users were working in polish version, while others worked in English. Towards which I will try to persuade you? I guess title has it 🙂

Since beginning of my career I worked with Excel in English no matter if it was at my regular work or when running courses. I will try to encourage you, my dear reader to work in English by listing few reasons that I believe are enough to make you change your mind.

First of all why you should change language to English is formulas naming convention. In my opinion English functions are much simpler and more intuitive. Below few examples:

• JEŻELI.BŁĄD / IFERROR
• PODAJ.POZYCJĘ / MATCH
• WYSZUKAJ.PIONOWO / VLOOKUP
• SUMA.WARUNKÓW / SUMIFS

As described above functions are not only more complex but also require using polish letters. Another reason why you should switch to English in Excel is coding in VBA. Whole VBA language is based on English so why use formulas in Polish? It makes your code more transparent, additionally it can generate issues regarding version incompatibility eg. when your code contains Polish formulas, whoever is trying to run macros in different language version (like English) may stumble upon error, because VBA does not translate formulas like spreadsheet does itself.

As we are in subject of VBA it is worth mentioning other languages, like SQL, Power Query or DAX functions in Power BI. All of them are currently executed in English. This is why I believe it is better to start working in English within your formulas because later it will make your work easier with other apps/ programming languages.

I believe listed reasons are enough to convince you to work with Excel in English. Of course I am not saying this is a must have. Of course I encourage to discussion in comments section. I would like to learn your experiences when it comes to work with Excel i different languages.