Change default language in Sharepoint (OneDrive)
For an international company, it is important to define the company language (e.g. English) as the default language. Unfortunately, when initializing O365, the language is set according to the location (in our case "German"). This is devastating because all SharePoint pages (including OneDrive) are subsequently created in "German". This should at least be pointed out.
Unfortunately there is no possibility to change the default language afterwards. The workarounds with multi-language support are not satisfactory. Nevertheless, German continues to dominate in many areas
Please point out the importance of the language during the initial setup and give the possibility to select the default language. As an alternative, it would be good if Microsoft provides a way to change the default language afterwards.
Gian
shared this idea
27 comments
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Anonymous
commented
We are a HK based company but primarily use English for correspondences. Our 0365 subscription is however set to Chinese by default, which is very annoying. Most of employees here use only English. Pls provide option ASAP to allow us to change the default language to English for all users in our o365 subscription.
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ilker
commented
I had several tickets about this issue. Problem is tickets are never reaching out to sharepoint developers. If it was possible to contact with a sharepoint developer, they could fix this in minutes. But unfortunately it's not possible. Only solution support is able to provide is deleting my-sharepoint site and re-creating it.
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Brian Iselin
commented
It is hopeless that we have our Sharepoint site in German, just because we are physically in Switzerland. As an international organisation, our working language is English, we have only one German speaker out of 40 staff, and even then we are in the French part of Germany. Why German? No organisation located in the Swiss Romandie could work with this. It makes no sense for us from any direction.
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Patrick Fürchau
commented
Also +3
We also have this issue. We have offices spread around the world and company language is English. So, it's useless to send emails in German, only because it was set up in Germany. -
Ian Caldwell
commented
Also - there is a uservoice request over in the Sharepoint side of things: https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/30953740-change-the-default-language-after-the-sharepoint-s
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Ian Caldwell
commented
*Update* After yet another support ticket with Microsoft, the official answer is that this is by design i.e. the locale is selected on day one, end of story. An Office 365 tenant is hosted on a locale-specific server, which can never, ever be changed. In my view, changing language is not a feature, this is a core accessibility issue. Language lock-in destroys accessibility and discriminates. Management is very unhappy, to say the least.
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Joao Vitor Rosa
commented
It is necessary to change the "Regional Settings" of the site to change the language of formulas in Excel Online. This does not make sense because changing the regional settings I change other settings that are not related to the language I use but the region where I am.
The language of the formulas should be changed by the site language or the user's preferred language and not by regional settings. -
Ian Caldwell
commented
+1 for this change - we urgently need an update and way to fix the "default" language - it is of no use to our employees in the US, Thailand or Colombia to get some emails from Sharepoint in Swedish. If the user language preference cannot be respected across all 365 services, then there should be a way to select and change the default language.
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Andreas
commented
This is extremely frustrating to deal with in an international company that is not based in the US or some other English speaking country.
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Lennard
commented
Same here in the Netherlands; tenant setup in NL and hence language is in Dutch. With offices in Malaysia and Houston and e-mail notifications from SharePoint in Dutch this is not working.
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CHO Kwanghyun
commented
It is annoying that we could not use other language due to the automatic selection of region. I am quite wondering MS knows and understands this critical issue!!!!.
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Rupan
commented
I logged a ticket with MS but unfortunately this feature is not available. when we are setting up the tenant there is no option for selecting the language, It will take its own language based on the region we selected. Really frustrated when I see everything in Arabic & don't know to read.
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Anonymous
commented
Pathetic user experience. This is never expected in a Microsoft software.
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Anonymous
commented
Default language is Hindi in our case, unable to change it to English.
Most of the email notifications are Hindi from Sharepoint and Onedrive to users, Quite annoying for our employees who receive these emails not understanding them. -
Arun
commented
my default is hindi i need to change english
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Dom
commented
I opened a ticket at MS with the number 14493977. In our case all employees are getting the emails from @sharepointonline.com in the sites default languages. Apparently this can not be changed. Quite annoying for our employees who receive these emails not understanding them.
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Anonymous
commented
We are also stuck with the language problem, when the partner who set up our tenant years ago did not pay attention. And i got a lot of customers with this problem.
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Anonymous
commented
This is a nobrainer, Comeon Microsoft!
Anonymous, what Powershell setting are you talking about to change this setting? -
Anonymous
commented
This would be very good. I have not found a solution elsewhere other than to have automated PowerShell changing this setting, which of course may not be correct if one wishes to change to a different language at some point on a particular site.
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Roger Wehrli
commented
Totally agree with the feature request. For Switzerland with four languages it is an absolut must have.