How to change the display language in Excel

Different reasons might make you want to change the language in Excel. You may need Excel to be in a familiar language for you to allow you to do your work. For a training or demonstration session, you may need to change the Excel language to fit another person’s preferences.

Also, sometimes changing the Excel Language to English may enable some features that can be available for the English version only at that moment.

Let’s see how to change Excel’s language from English to Portuguese in Excel for Microsoft 365. The steps are similar if you are looking to switch between any other two languages.

These instructions were crated in Excel for Microsoft 365 on Oct 9, 2020.

Open Excel, go to the File tab, and choose Options, and then Language.

Check if the language that you want is installed under Office Display Language.

In my case, I already have the Portuguese language installed there, but If you still don’t have the language that you need, you can click on install additional display languages from Office.com

You will get a window with a list of languages, you can choose the language that you need.

When you click on the language that you want to install, Excel will take you to a page where you can download the language package. You may need to choose the appropriate version for your system (32-bit or 64-bit.)

After you download the file, you have to open it, install it and then close and reopen Excel.

After having installed the file for the language that you need, go to the File tab and choose Options and then Language.

Choose the language you want, in this case, Portuguese, and then click on set as preferred.

You can also change the language under Office authoring languages and proofing and then click on set as preferred.

Please note that this change will take effect the next time you start Office.

The next time you open Excel, you will find that the display language changed.

Another thing is might be important that you check, are the decimal and thousand separators.

After having changed the display language to Portuguese, If I type VLOOKUP, Excel will not find this function because the equivalent of VLOOKUP in Portuguese is PROCV.

If I type PROCV, and check the separators between the different parameters, I will see they are commas. But in fact, in Portugal, because the comma is used as the decimal separator, it cannot be used as a separator in the formulas between the parameters. If we want to have the full Portuguese experience when using Excel, so that we enter data and write formulas the same way we would do if we were in Portugal using the Portuguese version of Excel, we may need to change decimal and thousand separators.

To do this, click on File (in Portuguese it is Ficheiro,) then go to Options (Portuguese: Opções,) and under Advanced (Portuguese: Avançadas), look for the separators (Portuguese: separadores.)

Unlike in English, in Portuguese, we use a comma for the decimal separator and a dot (.) as the thousands separator.

After changing the decimal and thousand separator to comma and dot respectively, if I type PROCV in Excel’s formula bar, we will see the semicolon as the separator between parameters.

Now you should have your Excel ready to work in the new language.

A final Note: Please BE CAREFUL not to change the display language to a language that you do not understand, because it can be tricky to find your way back to set it to the language you understand.

More information by Microsoft here and here.

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