About

An expert-led reference for cross-locale Excel work.

ryfinance.xyz is a focused editorial project: a single-purpose tool plus a verified dictionary that solves one specific, recurring problem — making Excel formulas travel reliably between regional settings. We are not a general spreadsheet blog and not a software vendor. We publish what we have personally tested in a live, locale-installed installation of Microsoft 365.

Why this site exists

Every cross-border finance, audit, and operations team eventually loses a day to the same problem: a workbook that works perfectly in one locale opens with a screen full of #NAME? errors in another. The cause is rarely the model itself. It is the fact that Excel function names are localized at parse time, and the argument separator and decimal symbol both follow the operating system's regional configuration rather than any setting inside the file. The fix is mechanical, but tedious and easy to get wrong on a model with hundreds of formulas.

ryfinance.xyz exists to make that fix one paste away. The tool runs entirely in your browser; the surrounding content explains, in technical terms, exactly what is being changed and why. We treat the dictionary the way a publisher treats a reference work: every entry is verified, every change is logged, every contributor is named.

Our editorial principles

Verification before publication. Every translation row is tested in a live, locale-installed copy of Microsoft 365 before it appears on the site. We do not rely on third-party listings or community-sourced tables.
Named accountability. The editor responsible for the dictionary is named on the home page and is contactable directly. Corrections are credited to the reader who reports them.
Transparent dating. Every legal page carries a “Last updated” date that reflects the last substantive change, not the last cosmetic edit.
No upselling. The translator is free, will remain free, and contains no upsell to paid services. Site revenue, when ads are enabled, is disclosed in the privacy policy.
Privacy by architecture. The translator runs on the client. We could not exfiltrate your formulas if we wanted to: the engine is a single, readable JavaScript file served unminified, and works offline once the page is loaded.

The team

Bianca M. Albrecht — Editor-in-chief

International Finance Consultant · Frankfurt / Madrid

Bianca is responsible for every translation row in the public dictionary. She holds an MSc in Quantitative Finance from WU Wien, a CIMA Certificate in Business Accounting, and the Microsoft Office Specialist (Expert) certification for Excel. Over the last decade she has worked across Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid and London on consolidation, treasury and FP&A engagements. Her full bio is on the home page.

Reviewing translators

German · French · Spanish

Each language column in the dictionary is verified by a reviewer who runs Excel natively in that locale. Reviewers are named in the public changelog of the translation table whenever an entry they touched is added or revised. We deliberately do not crowdsource: a fixed reviewer list is the only way to maintain a clear audit trail.

Engineering

Front-end & data integrity

The translator engine is a single vanilla-JavaScript file. It performs no network calls, ships no third-party tracking on the tool itself, and is small enough to be read in full in fifteen minutes. We keep it that way deliberately so that any security-conscious user can audit the whole pipeline without specialist tooling.

How the dictionary is maintained

New entries and corrections follow a fixed three-step process before they appear on the site:

Triage. Every reader-reported correction is acknowledged within 24 business hours and assigned to a reviewer for the relevant locale.
Live verification. The reviewer types the function name into a locale-installed copy of Microsoft 365, evaluates a representative formula, and captures the result. A round-trip translation is then run through this site to confirm stability.
Publication and changelog. The dictionary entry is updated and the change is recorded in the public changelog with the date, the reviewer's initials, and a short note on what was changed.

When Microsoft renames or introduces a function in a feature update, we re-verify the affected rows within five business days of the update reaching the Current Channel. The most recent end-to-end re-verification was performed against Microsoft 365 v2401.

What we are not

We are not a translation agency. If you need a human linguist to translate the text content of a workbook (titles, comments, drop-down values), we are happy to recommend agencies on request, but we do not provide that service.
We are not a Microsoft product. References to Microsoft, Excel, Microsoft 365 and Windows are for identification only. ryfinance.xyz is independent and not endorsed by Microsoft Corporation.
We do not provide financial, tax, audit or legal advice. The dictionary is a syntax reference; the appropriateness of a given formula in your reporting framework is for you and your advisors to determine. See the disclaimer.

Get in touch

Editorial corrections, locale requests, accessibility issues, partnership enquiries, and privacy questions are all handled through the contact page. We commit to a 24-business-hour first response and we keep that promise.