Most of us are no stranger to Microsoft Excel in our day-to-day work. It’s the industry standard for spreadsheets, and is an incredibly powerful tool.
Did you know you can translate Excel files much like any other file? For the best chance of success, be mindful of these top tips when translating Excel spreadsheets:
Make sure your Excel file is finalised
Adding in sentences, editing content and making changes once translators have started makes things more costly, and slows things down.
Notes and comments
Excel allows users to add notes and comments to cells. They can provide valuable additional context, or provide information for other users to action.
If any notes and comments are important to your target audience, these will need to be included for translation. Just let your translation company know.
If the notes and comments are there as reminders for you, or relate to tasks you haven’t yet completed, clear things back before sending for translation. See previous section!
Don’t worry about repetitions
There’s no need to worry about removing repeated words or phrases in your Excel file. Our technology recognises any repetitions and removes them from the ‘new word’ count, meaning you pay less for repeated content.
Check your tabs
If your Excel spreadsheet has multiple tabs, make sure you tell us which ones you want translating. By default, all tabs are included.
Tabs that do not need to be translated (but still might be important to your sheet) can be hidden for translation. This keeps it clean for the translators, and helps to keep costs at a minimum.
Numbers don't count as words
Excel translation costs are based on the number of words to be translated. Numbers are not included, they won’t affect the translation cost. Depending on the target language, we might still need to localise number formats (using correct thousand separators and decimals, for example).
