Working in another language

The thing to hold on to before anything else: language is not one setting, it is two. Each Gantt chart carries its own language, and the workbook as a whole carries an App Language. Most confusion about “why is this bit still in English?” comes from changing one of them and expecting the other to follow.

01 Two settings, not one

A single workbook can hold several projects. Gantt Excel is built so that those projects need not agree with each other — a Spanish team and a German team can keep their own charts in the same file, each in its own language. That is only possible if the language belongs to the chart rather than to the file.

But some parts of the product aren’t about any one chart. The Project Dashboard consolidates every project in the workbook onto one sheet, so it cannot borrow a language from “the” project — there isn’t one. That is what the App Language is for.

02 The languages that ship

Eleven languages are built in. Every language picker in the product shows them by their own native name, not by an English name:

• English · Español (España) · Español (Latinoamérica)
• Français · Português (Portugal) · Português (Brasil)
• Deutsch · Nederlands · Italiano
• 日本語 · 简体中文

Spanish and Portuguese each ship twice on purpose. es-ES and es-419 differ in wording rather than in meaning — a parent task’s children are tareas secundarias in the Spain edition and subtareas in the Latin America one — and the same applies to pt-PT against pt-BR. Pick whichever reads naturally to the people using the file.

All eleven come from one place inside the workbook, so every dropdown in the product offers exactly the same list. There is no separate download and no language pack to install.

03 Setting the language for a chart

There are four moments where a chart’s language gets decided, and they all land on the same setting.

After the Update click in Settings, Gantt Excel confirms with The language has been updated. Please close this Settings window to fully apply the new language. That request is genuine, not boilerplate: the Settings window’s own labels and buttons were written when it opened, so they keep the old language until you close and reopen it. The sheet and the ribbon behind it have already changed.

If you click Update without choosing anything, you get Please select a language. and nothing is changed.

04 Setting the App Language

The App Language lives on the App tab of the Settings window: pick a language from the Language dropdown there and click its Update button.

Its confirmation is deliberately worded differently from the per-chart one — The app language has been updated. It will apply to the dashboard and new projects the next time the dashboard is refreshed. Nothing on screen changes at that moment, and that is correct behaviour rather than a failure: no existing chart is touched, and the dashboard picks the change up the next time it is built or refreshed.

05 What changes when you switch

Switching a chart’s language is a live relocalisation, not a reload. Most of it lands the moment you click Update:

• The column headers in row 9 are rewritten — Task becomes Tarea, Start becomes Inicio, Finish becomes Fin, % Complete becomes % Completado, and so on down the row. Two exceptions, both intentional: a Custom column you have renamed keeps the name you gave it, and the three narrow spacer columns inside the grid have no heading to translate.
• The ribbon — every button on the Gantt Excel tab, their tooltips, and nine of the ten section headings. The far-right group holding About is headed Gantt Excel in every language, for the same reason the tab itself is.
• Every dialog and message — the Task Form, Resources, Settings, warnings and confirmations. Each is translated the next time it opens.
• The Priority and Status dropdowns offer their choices in the new language: High / Normal / Low read Alta / Normal / Baja, and Not Started / In Progress / Completed read No iniciado / En curso / Completado.

The words already sitting in those two columns are rewritten too, but they get there by different routes:

• Priority is rewritten immediately. Switch the language and the existing rows change with everything else — High, Normal and Low become Alta, Normal and Baja straight away, matching the dropdown above them.
• Status catches up on its own, but not instantly. The Status column is rewritten wholesale during a formatting pass, and clicking Update does not run one. Your existing rows keep saying In Progress until the next refresh or recalculation of the chart — edit a task, change a percentage, rebuild the timeline — and then the whole column appears in the new language at once. It gets there in the end because Status is worked out from % Complete rather than typed, so every refresh re-writes it.

Worked example — the kitchen refit in Spanish

Take the kitchen-refit chart used throughout this documentation and switch it from English to Español (España). One of its tasks is “Fit kitchen units”, running Mon 6 July → Fri 10 July, a duration of 5 days, marked High priority and In Progress. The task list itself is untouched; the frame around it changes:

The dates and the duration are numbers, so they read identically either way — how they are formatted is the separate Date Format setting covered in the next section, not a consequence of the language.

Note the fourth row. Your own text is never translated — task names, notes, resource names, the project name. Gantt Excel translates its own vocabulary and leaves your content alone, which is the only safe behaviour: an automatic translation of “Fit kitchen units” would be a guess written into your data.

And note the last three. The choices on offer change immediately; the words already written into the rows do not keep pace with them. Status is rewritten in bulk the next time the chart recalculates, and Priority stays in the language it was set in until somebody sets it again.

06 What does not change

Three things people reasonably expect to follow the language and which are governed elsewhere:

• Date format. It is its own setting — Date Format in Settings — so switching to German does not switch you to TT.MM.JJJJ. Set the format you want independently of the language.
• The currency symbol. Also its own setting, Currency Symbol in Settings. A French project is not assumed to be priced in euros.
• The ribbon tab name. The tab is called Gantt Excel on every install, because it is the product’s name rather than a word. The same goes for the far-right section inside it, the one holding About: it carries the product name as its heading and so it stays put too. The buttons and the other section headings all translate.

This split is deliberate. Language, date format and currency are three genuinely independent choices — a Dutch contractor billing a British client in pounds should not have to accept a different date format to get Dutch menus.

07 The Project Dashboard follows the App Language

The dashboard is the one screen that ignores the project language completely. Whichever project you pick from the dropdown at the top, the entire dashboard renders in the App Language — tile captions, chart titles, the summary panel, the slicer headings and the Status and Priority labels in the data behind them.

That is not an oversight. The dashboard counts tasks by grouping them on their Status and Priority words. If a Spanish project contributed Alta while a German one contributed Hoch, one real priority would arrive as two separate categories and every total would be split down the middle. Resolving all of them through a single language is what keeps the counts, the charts and the donut honest.

08 Three gaps worth knowing about

Translation coverage is close to complete, but three pieces of on-screen text stay in the language they were written in, whatever you set the chart to. None of them breaks anything; all three are visible, so they are worth naming rather than letting you find them.

• The grey “add a task” row. The faint italic row under your last task always reads Type here to add a new task, in English, in every language. It is a fixed piece of text in the product rather than a translated one. Typing over it works exactly as it does in English.
• The Critical column’s values. On a chart with the critical path switched on, the column heading is translated — Crítica, Kritisch — but the values inside it are written as the literal words Yes and No in every language. The related columns beside it (Late Start, Late Finish, Total Float, Free Slack) hold numbers and dates, so they read correctly everywhere.
• Priority values already on the rows. As covered in section 05, these keep the language they were set in — the dropdown switches, the existing cells do not. This one is not permanent: set a row’s priority again and it is written in the current language.

09 Changing the wording yourself

Every piece of text in Gantt Excel lives on a hidden worksheet inside the workbook, one row per phrase and one column per language. You can reach it, and you can override any phrase you disagree with.

The same sheet is how a twelfth language gets added: a new column, headed with a language code and name separated by a pipe — en-GB | English (United Kingdom) — plus that language’s own name in the row above the headers. Every language dropdown in the product then offers it, with no other change needed. Filling in the eight hundred and fifty-odd rows is the real work; the plumbing is already there.

10 Common questions

Related: Settings · The Project Dashboard · Creating your first chart · The Critical Path & float