1) You can change the language of the user interface only when you have the
Multilingual package, which is only distributed with corporate versions of
Office. But if you have the French version, you can display the English
formula with a UDF which returns the .Formula property

2) The French workbook you receive will be displayed in the language of your
local version; it will be "translated" automatically. The internal
representation of formulas is independent of your language. There are a few
tricky things. All literals are suspect: format codes (like those for dates)
like in the TEXT function, cell addresses in INDIRECT functions if they are
in R1C1 style, etc. Also the Analysis Toolpak functions will not be
translated.


--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten

Microsoft MVP - Excel

"ExcelMonkey" wrote in message
...
Thanks all. Very helpful. Two last questions.

1)Is it possible to change the setting in my Excel so that it runs in
another language. That is, i want to see it they way the do in other
countries. Or is this a Windows setting. I would like to do some
testing
in these other versions. I want to know if it is as simple as flicking a
swich on my own computer.

2)When I reived an excel file from another country (say France), it will
likely be in French. Is it possible in Excel to view that file from my
english windows/excel in English or does it only view in the language that
it
orginated in (French)?

Thanks again all!



"ExcelMonkey" wrote:

I have a function that searches on a string that makes up a function name
say
"=IF(". Now lets assumed that I can do this perfectly, ignoring any
string
search shortfalls of VBA (I know I can use Regular Expressions too).

If I am doing this in a version of Excel that is not English say French,
the
IF Statment will likely not be the english IF. As such a search for
"IF(" in
a french version - or any other version - of windows is not likely to be
productive. If I wanted to build a search function that looked for "IF("
in
every language version of Excel, what would be the best way of doing
this?
Would I:

1) create a sub that recognises what language version I am in, then pass
the
correct function spelling for that function in that langauge to a
variable
and search on it
2) Or are the functions just simply backed by a general library that can
be
referenced (say a ref number that is common to all IF statments in all
languages versions of Excel?

If need be where can I get the function names across all languages?


Thanks