Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

17

International Issues

If you think that your application may be used internationally, it has to work with any supported Windows Regional Setting, on any supported language version of Windows, and with any language choice for the Excel user interface.

Any bugs in your application that arise from international issues will not occur on your development machine unless you explicitly test for them. However, they will be found immediately by your clients.

The combination of Regional Settings and Excel language is called the user's “locale” and the aim of this chapter is to show you how to write locale-independent VBA applications. In order to do this, we include an explanation of the features in Excel that deal with locale-related issues and highlight areas within Excel where locale support is absent or limited. Workarounds are provided for most of these limitations, but some are so problematic that the only solution is to not use the feature at all.

The rules provided in this chapter should be included in your coding standards and used by you and your colleagues. It is easy to write locale-independent code from scratch; it is much more difficult to make existing code compatible with the many different locales in the world today.

Changing Windows Regional Settings and the Office XP UI Language

Throughout this chapter, the potential errors will be demonstrated by using the following three locales:

The regional settings are changed using the Regional Settings applet (Regional and Language ...