Following up on an earlier question I had about horizontal vs vertical arrays, I have a question about it's respective delimiters.
Problem definition:
Hereby an example of an incorrect way of comparing two arrays:
{=SUMPRODUCT(--({"Apple","Pear"}={"Apple","Lemon","Pear"}))}
The correct way, in case of an English application countrycode would be:
{=SUMPRODUCT(--({"Apple","Pear"}={"Apple";"Lemon";"Pear"}))}
Within an English version (most likely more than just English) of Excel these delimiters would respectively be a comma ,
for horizontal arrays and a semicolon ;
for vertical ones. Plenty of online information to be found on this.
Working on a machine with a Dutch country code on it's application however, it't a complete other story. It does frustrate that my delimiters would both be different, respectively ;
and a \
. Being able to rather simply retrieve the semi-colon it's proven to be tricky to find any documentation on these delimiters for international version.
Workaround:
Not knowing these delimiters up-front makes it tricky for anyone on a variety of international versions of the application to work with these type of formulas. A rather easy workaround would be to use TRANSPOSE()
:
{=SUMPRODUCT(--({"Apple";"Pear"}=TRANSPOSE({"Apple";"Lemon";"Pear"})))}
Going through the build-in evaluation we can then retrieve the backslash as the column seperator. Another way would be to use the Application.International property and it's xlColumnSeparator
and xlRowSeparator
.
Question
We can both find and even override the xlDecimalSeparator
and xlThousandsSeparator
through Excel (File > Options > Advanced), or VBA (Application.DecimalSeparator = "-"
) but where can we find:
xlRowSeparator
and xlColumnSeparator
are used within your own application, other than the workarounds I described. Looking for an interface similar to thousands and decimal seperator and/or official MS-documentation.Furthermore (not specifically looking for this), is there:
I'm very curious if official documentation is present, and/or if the above can be done.
Not claiming this is the right answer, but with the help from comments from other users, maybe the below can clarify things a bit:
With no sign of any official documentation on this matter, and seemingly random row and column delimiters @Gserg showed a trick to retrieve information for any LCID using these unique id's on MS office support under "Create one-dimensional and two-dimensional constants". While this is MS office support information, the delimiters you see there are FALSE. They might come up as .
a ,
a ;
a :
a \
or even a |
. You get this results by changing the LCID from the URL to a LCID of interest, e.g.: fr-fr
.
Although there are about 600 different LCID's they all get redirected to a default LCID. With the help of @FlorentB. we discovered that not only the MS office support documentation is wrong, it seems that these delimiters are not that random after all. Looking at countries using a decimal point, they use the ,
as a column delimiter (a horizontal array) and a ;
as a row delimiter (a vertical array). Countries using a decimal comma however use a \
as a column delimiter and a ;
for rows respectively.
Changing the system country settings, checking all default LCID's in Excel, we ended up with the matrix below showing all row and column delimiters per default LCID:
| LCID | Row | Column |
|-------|-----|--------|
| ar-sa | ; | , |
| bg-bg | ; | \ |
| cs-cz | ; | \ |
| da-dk | ; | \ |
| de-de | ; | \ |
| el-gr | ; | \ |
| en-gb | ; | , |
| en-ie | ; | , |
| en-us | ; | , |
| es-es | ; | \ |
| et-ee | ; | \ |
| fi-fi | ; | \ |
| fr-fr | ; | \ |
| he-il | ; | , |
| hr-hr | ; | \ |
| hu-hu | ; | \ |
| id-id | ; | \ |
| it-it | ; | \ |
| ja-jp | ; | , |
| ko-kr | ; | , |
| lt-lt | ; | \ |
| lv-lv | ; | \ |
| nb-no | ; | \ |
| nl-nl | ; | \ |
| pl-pl | ; | \ |
| pt-br | ; | \ |
| pt-pt | ; | \ |
| ro-ro | ; | \ |
| ru-ru | ; | \ |
| sk-sk | ; | \ |
| sl-si | ; | \ |
| sv-se | ; | \ |
| th-th | ; | , |
| tr-tr | ; | \ |
| uk-ua | ; | \ |
| vi-vn | ; | \ |
| zh-cn | ; | , |
| zh-hk | ; | , |
| zh-tw | ; | , |
The apparent conclusion is that all countries use a semicolon as a row (vertical) delimiter. And depending on decimal seperator countries use a backslash or comma as a column (horizontal) delimiter within array formulas.
So even without proper MS-documentation, nor a place within the Excel interface (like thousand en decimal delimiter do have), on this matter it is apparent that knowing your country's decimal seperator will automatically mean you either use a \
or ,
as a column delimiter.
| Dec_Seperator | Row | Column |
|---------------|-----|--------|
| . | ; | , |
| , | ; | \ |
I would happily recieve more information about the above and/or presence of any correct MS office documentation to add to this.