This is a simple request that, until recently, had a frustrating answer. Chuckster1972 wants one workbook in French Canadian and another in English, without forcing every Office application to switch languages. Microsoft does not make this easy. You can set a file's locale, but the display language for menus, ribbon text, and date formatting pulls from a single global preference. Change it for one file, and Outlook, Word, and every other Excel workbook follow along. That is not a user problem. It is a design limitation baked into a tool built before most of us needed to work across languages in the same afternoon.
The practical cost here is not just inconvenience. It is friction in real workflows. A consultant managing a bilingual client, a finance team reporting to an international parent company, a researcher publishing in two languages, each one hits this wall. The workaround is either to maintain separate Office installations or to toggle the system language back and forth, which risks breaking formulas, date serials, and regional formatting every time you switch. Neither option is productive. Neither respects the user's time. And neither acknowledges that a single file should be able to hold its own identity.
What Chuckster1972 is really asking for is a tool that understands context. A spreadsheet is not a monolith. It is a living document that may need to speak French to one audience and English to another, all while sitting on the same machine. The technology to handle this already exists: per-file locale settings, AI-driven formatting detection, and dynamic display language toggles are all feasible. The barrier is not capability. It is the assumption that a user's language preference is a flat, global setting rather than a contextual one tied to the task at hand.
This is where modern spreadsheet tools have an opportunity to lead. Instead of treating language as an application-level switch, treat it as a property of the workbook itself, or better yet, of individual sheets or regions within a sheet. Let the user define the display language, number format, and date convention at the file level, and let those settings travel with the file. That is not a revolutionary idea. It is a practical one. And for anyone who has ever had to manually convert a column of percentages from English to French Canadian, it is the only answer that makes sense.