Microsoft expect us to be multi-lingual

[R4+Z]

I recently ran into an unusual one on Excell 2002.

If you format a cell as custom and set it to 000 when you enter data eg 20 it displays as 020. All well and good but if you then go to look at the format of that cell again it has miraculously changed to special with chinese symbols for the setting and a box has appeared saying locale (location): and in that box it says Chinese (Taiwan). if you then change it back to english the formatting returns to general so it is impossible to check what it is set as unless you read Taiwanese (yes it does show you a sample but if you saw an entry and went to check how it was set, the example is only going to show you what you already know).

I contacted microsoft about this and they claim it does this by design and want to charge me $50.00 to even discuss it at a technical level.

Is it just me or would you expect an entry made in english to remain in english?

:confused: :confused: :confused:

[stickyb]

If you format the cell to 00000 then go back to it as you describe, then the format is special, the locale US and it is a zip code.

What has happened is that your format of 000 just heppens to co-incide with one of the preset Taiwanese codes, so when you go back to look again it can't tell the difference.

Will always happen if a custome format you input co-incides with a preset special.

[R4+Z]

So what is the point in setting your language settings if it is just going to snap into another language.

Sounds like they found a bug so rewrote the manual to make it a feature.