Horizontal vs Vertical array delimiters - International

Question

Following up on an earlier question I had about horizontal vs vertical arrays, I have a question about it\'s respective delimiters.

Problem definition:<

Answer 1

Not claiming this is the right answer, but with the help from comments from other users, maybe the below can clarify things a bit:

With no sign of any official documentation on this matter, and seemingly random row and column delimiters @Gserg showed a trick to retrieve information for any LCID using these unique id's on MS office support under "Create one-dimensional and two-dimensional constants". While this is MS office support information, the delimiters you see there are FALSE. They might come up as . a , a ; a : a \ or even a |. You get this results by changing the LCID from the URL to a LCID of interest, e.g.: fr-fr.

Although there are about 600 different LCID's they all get redirected to a default LCID. With the help of @FlorentB. we discovered that not only the MS office support documentation is wrong, it seems that these delimiters are not that random after all. Looking at countries using a decimal point, they use the , as a column delimiter (a horizontal array) and a ; as a row delimiter (a vertical array). Countries using a decimal comma however use a \ as a column delimiter and a ; for rows respectively.

Changing the system country settings, checking all default LCID's in Excel, we ended up with the matrix below showing all row and column delimiters per default LCID:

| LCID  | Row | Column |
|-------|-----|--------|
| ar-sa | ;   | ,      |
| bg-bg | ;   | \      |
| cs-cz | ;   | \      |
| da-dk | ;   | \      |
| de-de | ;   | \      |
| el-gr | ;   | \      |
| en-gb | ;   | ,      |
| en-ie | ;   | ,      |
| en-us | ;   | ,      |
| es-es | ;   | \      |
| et-ee | ;   | \      |
| fi-fi | ;   | \      |
| fr-fr | ;   | \      |
| he-il | ;   | ,      |
| hr-hr | ;   | \      |
| hu-hu | ;   | \      |
| id-id | ;   | \      |
| it-it | ;   | \      |
| ja-jp | ;   | ,      |
| ko-kr | ;   | ,      |
| lt-lt | ;   | \      |
| lv-lv | ;   | \      |
| nb-no | ;   | \      |
| nl-nl | ;   | \      |
| pl-pl | ;   | \      |
| pt-br | ;   | \      |
| pt-pt | ;   | \      |
| ro-ro | ;   | \      |
| ru-ru | ;   | \      |
| sk-sk | ;   | \      |
| sl-si | ;   | \      |
| sv-se | ;   | \      |
| th-th | ;   | ,      |
| tr-tr | ;   | \      |
| uk-ua | ;   | \      |
| vi-vn | ;   | \      |
| zh-cn | ;   | ,      |
| zh-hk | ;   | ,      |
| zh-tw | ;   | ,      |

The apparent conclusion is that all countries use a semicolon as a row (vertical) delimiter. And depending on decimal seperator countries use a backslash or comma as a column (horizontal) delimiter within array formulas.

So even without proper MS-documentation, nor a place within the Excel interface (like thousand en decimal delimiter do have), on this matter it is apparent that knowing your country's decimal seperator will automatically mean you either use a \ or , as a column delimiter.

| Dec_Seperator | Row | Column |
|---------------|-----|--------|
| .             | ;   | ,      |
| ,             | ;   | \      |

I would happily recieve more information about the above and/or presence of any correct MS office documentation to add to this.