Why links are not working when using Excel in Portuguese.

Below is an e-mail I received from Stella Customer service.

Dear Ms. Lusiana,

Thanks for your email, in which you note difficulties in using an Excel-linked STELLA model under the Portuguese version of Windows. We have done some research into the issue, and believe we have some suggestions that may prove helpful to you. The basic issue relates to different uses of punctuation characters (for example, commas) among the various operating systems.

Below I have pasted our internal tech note, "Crossing the Border with DDE." I trust that it will prove useful to you in your work in Brazil.

Best regards,

Steve Peterson

HPS Tech Support Team

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Crossing the Border with DDE...

I've come across some tricky steps associated with using ithink in other countries, especially with DDE. Much thanks to Dan and Steve for helping me get over some of the hurdles.

Thought I'd pass them along for your reference.

1. Formatting outputs. Our client in Brazil does all of their accounting in US$ because they are an American company. Great, I thought! No need to worry about the fact that you can't format tables or numeric display for other currencies. Boy was I surprised to see that on the computers here, stuff formatted as $ shows up as R$, the Brazilian currency (the real). Turns out that in

Windows, you can specify Regional Settings which will automatically change the format of currencies for you. This affects ithink only on tables and numeric displays, so far as I can tell. The only way to fix it is to change the regional settings (on windows control panel) to US, and this requires restarting the computer. (Turns out the client wasn't too upset about this. Apparently it's common to have to do this for a variety of reasons, depending on what software you are using, or who created the file you are working with.)

2. Those crazy dots! Don't forget that commas and decimal points are reversed in many countries. So $1,234.56 looks like $1.234,56. If you are importing data from Excel to ithink, this will really screw things up, if the Regional Setting is on a foreign country, since ithink doesn't know what to do with $1.234,56. Again, one possible work around is to set the Regional Setting to US, and restart the computer. It's also possible to reformat the export cells in Excel to the US format with some builtin functions in Excel which handle text. (example attached) I suppose it's also possible to use custom formatting, but I couldn't make this work reliably.

3. When exporting from ithink to excel, and using Windows 2000 or NT, DDE will not work without a manual "update links" command from within excel. (This is a bummer if you really just need DDE to access a large excel database, and don't want the end-user to have to work in two programs.)

4. With DDE, you have to have the files in the exact same location on your client's computer as they are on yours. Because of this, I discovered that the Portuguese word for "Desktop" is not "Desktop." So simply placing the files on the desktop didn't work. Best thing is to create a special folder right on the root directory of the C drive.

5. Another language issue. When DDE links are created from excel, you'll notice in the Link Editor that the link is designated as "R3C5" or something to that effect, which stands for Row 3 Column 5 in the Excel spreadsheet. Only problem is that in Portuguese, "Row" is "Lina," so if you create the link on a Portuguese computer, you see "L3C5" instead. For this reason, if you create the link on a US computer, and try to email it to somebody in another country, it may just not work. The universal antidote to this, regardless of Regional Settings, is to give the export cells a Name in Excel (insert/name/define command), and then manually change the "R3C5" in the

ithink Link Editor to the name of the cell or cell range. This is good practice anyway, since you can then move the linked cell around the spreadsheet as you edit it, and not screw up the link.

6. There are a couple ways to screw up links within Excel. One is from the edit/links command, where you can make a setting to update links manually only (irrespective of what operating system you are using.) Also, if the spreadsheet is complex, the "automatic recalculation" setting may be disabled. (tools/options/calculation command). If it needs to remain disabled, the user would have to press F9 to update links.