Semicolons in German language settings

Hi community,

I had a hard time with Smartsheet support (used to be different) regarding my issue.

Has anyone else with Smartsheet set to german speaking setup the problem described below?

Starting some time last week, Smartsheet started to have trouble with semicolons as separators in formulas.

And yes, semicolons are used instead of commas in my settings (german) for years now. Same is true for my 4 team colleagues.

Problem:

Smartsheet now started to automatically replace semicolons with commas. This is particularly annoying if you work with formulas all the time and modify them untill they work. Now I have to constantly replace all commas with semicolons when modifying a formula....

To illustrate the problem:

If I use a simple formula with commas like that in any of my sheets:

=sum(Value8, Value8)

I get "unparsable".

If I change the formula to:

=sum([Value8; Value8)

it works.

I think this is some kind of bug maybe introduced with the latest udates to Smartsheet. But it took me 4 emails even to make Smartsheet support realize, that there is life outside the US and functionality may be different.

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Comments

Stefan 7k

Sorry, typo,

=sum(Value8, Value9)

etc.

Shaine Greenwood

EDIT: I also noticed that our help center articles are experiencing an issue where the semicolons don't appear in our formula examples. I'm working with our website team to resolve that issue as soon as possible.

Hi Stefan,

You're completely correct—when your language is set to German (or a country that uses the comma for decimal values), you'll need to use semi-colons between parameters:

German: =SUM(Value8; Value9)

US: =SUM(Value8, Value9)

Sorry for the back and forth on this; this is definitely an opportunity for educating our support reps on how this works.

Here's one thing that I've noticed:

I set my language to French
Typed =SUM(Type7, Type9) in a cell
Received #UNPARSEABLE
Looked in the cell, formula was changed to =SUM(Type7;Type9) but the hover tooltip still had the old formula with the comma
Hit return—formula worked

Now, if I hit escape on my keyboard, I'd still receive #UNPARSEABLE

What our formula engine tries to do is correct the comma to semicolon, but it's not able to confirm that change until you double-click inside the cell and then hit return/enter on your keyboard.

I've escalated this to a higher tier in our Support team to make sure of what the expected behavior is, and make sure there isn't a bug. (I don't think there is, but I could be wrong.)

I'll reply back when I get more information from our Support team on the expected behavior.

Stefan 7k

Hi Shaine,

great, that's the reply I hoped for when I contacted support ;-)

Stefan

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