Upgrading Reference for Localized Versions of Office

Sharing Excel Workbooks Across Language Versions

Just as with nonlocalized versions of Microsoft Excel, localized Excel 97 can open and read Excel 2000 workbooks directly. However, for Excel 95 and Excel 5.0 users to share Excel 2000 workbooks, Excel 2000 users must save their workbook in the dual Excel 97-2000 & 5.0/95 format, which is readable by the four latest versions of Excel.

Users of Excel 2000 and previous localized versions can share workbooks as follows:

• In Excel 2000, you can open and edit any workbook created in a previous localized version of Excel, regardless of the language, provided the operating system supports the language of the file.
• In localized Excel 97, you can open and edit Excel 2000 workbooks, regardless of the language, provided the operating system supports the language of the file.
• In localized Excel 95 and Excel 5.0, you need an operating system that supports the language of the file and the workbooks must be saved in the dual Excel 97-2000 & 5.0/95 format.

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Opening workbooks from previous localized versions in Excel 2000

When you open Excel 95 or Excel 5.0 workbooks in Excel 2000, Excel 2000 converts the text to Unicode. Because Excel 2000 and Excel 97 both support Unicode, Excel 2000 does not need to convert Excel 97 text.

Localized versions of Excel 2000 can display text in workbooks from previous versions of Excel as shown in the following table.

Note   English and European-language versions of Excel 2000 can display Asian text from Excel 97 workbooks, but not from Excel 95 and Excel 5.0 workbooks.

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Opening Excel 2000 workbooks in localized Excel 97

Excel 97 can directly open and read Excel 2000 workbooks. However, to display Asian or right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, or Urdu) text that doesn’t match the language version of Excel 97, you must have the appropriate language support installed on your computer.

For Asian text, you can install the Office 97 Asian support files, but for right-to-left text, you must use a compatible right-to-left language version of Excel 97.

Localized versions of Excel 97 can display Excel 2000 text as shown in the following table.

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Opening Excel 2000 workbooks in localized Excel 95 and Excel 5.0

Depending on the language, any language version of Excel 95 and Excel 5.0 can open and read Excel 2000 workbooks that are saved in the dual Excel 97-2000 & 5.0/95 format.

Localized versions of Excel 95 and Excel 5.0 can display Excel 2000 text as shown in the following table.

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Running macros from previous localized versions of Excel

When Excel 2000 opens localized workbooks from Excel 95 or Excel 5.0, it translates commands written in Microsoft Visual Basic to English as long as the necessary object library files are installed. If the macro includes procedures written in more than one language, you must install an object library for each language used in the macro.

To install object library files for multilingual macros

1. In the Extras\95olbs folder of the Microsoft Office 2000 MultiLanguage Pack CD-ROM, double-click InstOLB.exe.
2. In the Object Library Installer dialog box, choose the languages for which you want to install object library files.
3. If the path shown in the dialog box is not where the file Excel.exe is stored, click Browse and enter the correct path.
4. Click Install.

Note   All Excel 97 macros are compiled in English, so Excel 2000 does not need to translate them.

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See also

If your organization is upgrading from a previous version of Excel, there are several strategies for making a smooth transition, beyond cross-language considerations. For more information, see Upgrading to Excel 2000.

The Unicode standard provides unique character values for every language that Office supports and makes it even easier to share multilingual documents. For more information, see Sharing Multilingual Documents.

For some languages, you need to have an operating system and fonts that allow you to display and edit the text. For more information, see Configuring Users' Computers in an International Environment.