We export data in Office HTML format, so that end-users may use it directly
with Excel.
According to the Office HTML official documentation (ofhtml9.chm), we use
&L, &C, etc. metadata within the text values of the headers and footers
styles to control the formatting of the headers and footers. Unfortunately,
the french version of Excel translates the metadata. The same escape &E means
different things in the English and French versions of Excel. The french
version of Excel thus doesn't display correctly our headers and footers. In
other places though, they didn't translate the text values of styles. For
instance, in the page orientation style, "landscape" is not translated. And
the documentation has a long chapter about internationalization issues
without mentionning that issue. It thus looks like a specific localization
error. Is it the same in other translated versions of Excel? Is it officially
considered as a problem by MS? Is there a work-around, such as being able to
tell that the meta-data is in English?

Thanks forward.