The question of whether to learn Excel in English or your native language is deceptively simple, and the answer reveals a lot about how we think about our own futures. For the user who asked this, a German speaker with basic skills who wants to prepare for a job, the right choice is clear: switch to English now, while you still can. This isn't about language preference. It's about aligning your tools with the environment where your data will actually need to work.
Consider what happens when you search for a solution to a formula problem. The vast majority of tutorials, forums, and documentation are in English. If you know the German function name `SUMME`, you will struggle to translate that into `SUM` when you land on a Stack Overflow thread or a Microsoft support page. The friction is small at first, but it compounds. Every time you have to pause and mentally map a function to its English equivalent, you lose flow. Over time, that friction becomes a barrier to deeper learning. The user already recognizes that the switch would be "relatively easy" as a beginner. That insight is correct, and it is the window of opportunity. Once you internalize a workflow in German, retraining your muscle memory becomes a chore. As we explored in Returning to spreadsheets after a decade is more than muscle memory, the cognitive load of relearning familiar actions is heavier than most people anticipate.
There is a practical, career-oriented argument here that goes beyond convenience. English is the operating language of data. If you aim to work with spreadsheets in a professional context, whether in finance, operations, or analytics, you will eventually collaborate with colleagues, vendors, or tools that expect English. Your formulas, your macros, and your data models become portable assets when they are written in English. A workbook built with `WENN` instead of `IF` is a workbook that cannot be easily handed off to a teammate in London or New York. You are locking your work into a single locale. This is not a critique of German; it is a recognition that spreadsheets are a global medium. Choosing English is choosing interoperability.
The deeper lesson here is about how we position ourselves relative to the tools we use. Many people treat spreadsheet proficiency as a static skill, something you learn once and then apply. But the landscape is shifting. New AI-native capabilities are reshaping what a spreadsheet can do, and they are almost always released first in English. The user who learns in English today is building a foundation that will make it easier to adopt those innovations tomorrow. They are not just learning formulas; they are learning the vocabulary of the next generation of data tools. That is an investment in future fluency, not just current convenience.
So the takeaway is direct: learn Excel in English. Do it now, while your habits are still soft. The temporary discomfort of looking up a formula name is far smaller than the permanent friction of working in a language that the rest of the data world does not share. Your future self, the one who needs to debug a formula at 10 PM or pass a workbook to a colleague in another country, will thank you. The question is not whether you can grow with your data. It is whether you are willing to speak the language it already uses.