Translate an Excel File

What a spreadsheet lets you translate

A spreadsheet is two things at once: a table of text for people, and a program. The words a person reads are often also values a formula compares against — COUNTIF(B:B, "Paid"), a VLOOKUP keyed on a product name, a drop-down list of allowed entries, a table column referred to as Orders[Status]. Translating those cells would produce a workbook that looks perfect and computes the wrong numbers, with nothing to say so.

So before anything is translated, every formula, validation list, pivot cache and structured reference in the workbook is read, and any text they depend on is kept as it is. Everything else is translated — cell text, rich-text cells run by run, comments, notes, shapes and chart titles — with each run's font and colour following its words.

The rest of the file is untouched: numbers keep their number formats, dates stay dates, and styles, charts, pictures and macros are copied byte for byte. Excel stores repeated text once for the whole workbook, so a word used in a thousand cells is translated once and consistently everywhere.

When you want something else

For a workbook that is really a database — thousands of product descriptions to localise — a translation management tool with a glossary and review workflow does the job properly; machine translation of short, context-free cell text needs checking.

If you only need a sheet readable, Google Sheets' =GOOGLETRANSLATE() function translates cell by cell into new columns, which leaves the original text in place beside it.