Allow me to change regional settings: date formatting (mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy), thousands/decimal separators (period vs comma), formula language
Excel Online decides how to show dates and numbers and formulas based on where I live. I want to be able to choose how to display these Excel items. For dates, I might want mm/dd/yyyy, or I might want dd/mm/yyyy. My Excel formulas should be in the language of the application, and not based on where I live.

Hi,
Thank you for your feedback, please keep voting to influence Excel Online backlog priority.
91 comments
-
Simon Hunter commented
It's really odd. Standard date formats work fine for us....but if we do date/time combined ones - they're UK format on desktop but us format on web!
-
Elias commented
It's really necessary for english speaking employees living and working in UK or other english speaking countries to have their formulars in their regular languages!
It couldn't be that all employees have to follow the german language forumulars just because the base setup was done in german like we did in our company.
Please fix that bug asap.Thanks
-
Josef commented
Completely agree with Sergio, we encounter the same problem in the Netherlands. This problem
significantly reduces productivity in Excel Online and therefore also reduces the adoption of Excel Online at our users. -
Sergio commented
We have a problem with spanish regional settings in excel.
The num keyboard . automatically translates to , in excel with the option "Decimal separator"
Excel online does not does it automatically and it's a much needed option for spanish excel users as it slows add numeric data as it gets automatically configured default cell and not number making it unusable to make math operations.
-
adafdadsfa commented
its been 4 years already. cmon!!! it is so annoying! we are losing data over mistyped dates !! (inverting day-month , we never know when its dd/mm or mm/dd)
-
Michel commented
@cyrus Bharda, the instructions you linked to in your post are for Office 365, not the free Office online.
Thanks anyway
-
Cyrus Bharda commented
Not sure how hard it is to find, but after 10mins of Googling I found clear and easy to follow instructions on changing this:
One quirk was that if the regional settings don't show up then make sure to change the view back to "OneDrive Classic" and the setting will magically appear :)
-
Zahid commented
To put this in simple terms: Microsoft don't care about what customers think.
They are too busy trying to make new customers, not thinking about existing ones.
No wonder Apple boss became the first Trillionaire; they cared about end user and customers feedback. Sorry! to say this but Microsoft is run by careless people from customer perspective.
-
Anonymous commented
This is really frustrating as nothing changed from MS.
-
christopher neitzert commented
Yes Please.
Really at this point in microsoft's maturity model with Office and OWA apps being the most mature, you'd think that msft would be able to:
1. Make all regional settings a user defined setting
2. Make all language settings a user defined setting. Just because I am in china today does not mean i speak chineese or that i even know how to change it back to any I do speak.
3. Allow users to mix and match. I like ISO (eu) date formats, i do not like the swedish way of , = decimal.At this point in your maturity model all of this should be very easily controlled and passed from user profile to the app. This was possible in 1998, let alone 2008.
-
Marcus Svennerheim commented
I live in Sweden but I really hate that I have to use "Swedish" excel formulas in Excel online as they are so unintuitive. I have had to create my own excel sheet that translates from English formulas to Swedish formulas so that I can do my work. This works amazingly well in Google docs why can't you handle it Microsoft?
-
Anonymous commented
I don't think voting on anything actually gets Microsoft to do anything about it. I've voted on a few issues that have never been resolved
-
Michel commented
So I understand this issue has been reported back on 2015 and it is still not fixed. Is this the case?
-
Anonymous commented
Changing the regional settings in OneDrive does not help or influence Excel Online (in terms of comma or decimal separators). Further, it screws up payment processing (credit card) due to addresses and zip codes not matching card info...good thing I had no further plans to purchase anything...
How about fixing this...like soon (as in NOT next year or next quarter - NOW perhaps)? -
Jan Sin commented
Everything in Excel Online is in English with the exception if the formula / functions that is in German.
I would like to change the formula language to English.
-
Zahid commented
Why can't you get the basic fundamental thing right. I can't understand why we the public and end users have to keep on asking you to change something that is clearly not right with your application. Hopefully one of these days another company perhaps Apple would develop something far superior and we can leave the whole thing behind us - that's what we are wishing for right now.
-
MFK commented
I use period as decimal point on my desktop but it is comma in Excel app. I want to have the ability to change this setting. It should be rather simple to add this..
-
Andrew Ryder commented
I have made a nice little Excel Spead sheet for use between all the hotels in our town with a simple yes or no on each of their lines
I have inserted a date stamp so when each location has updated theirs the time stamp should reflect this.
When it is used offline it works perfectly with the local time and date being displayed.
However, when it is loaded onto one drive to share around it comes up with the time being delayed by about 10 hours.
It does come up with the warning that "Regional settings are set for English US"
This has occurred on two desktop computers, but when I tried it on the phone it works properly.
I would assume that maybe it has something to do with the software on Desktops as opposed to mobile devices with location?
I have turned on location on the two desktops and no change, I have updated all avenues that I can find with my proper location.
Funny thing is though that apparently Australia hasn't made the cut on a few of them either which may add to the issue.
I am in Australia and run under Australian Central Standard time whick is +9 of GMT.
If this could be looked at and solved, going from the rest of the comments, would make a lot of people happy. -
Anonymous commented
I suspect that Microsoft has no access to the part of Excel source code which governs language settings. And I hade this thought since 07/09/11.
-
Anonymous commented
This is ridiculous! Imagine if US users kept having their dates default to DD/MM/YY it would have been fixed years ago!!