My company has new customers in Brazil and we realized that our excel reports are not working when our Brazilian customers tried to open the reports in their Brazilian versions of excel.

For excel output we use spreadsheet gear in our vb.net web application. Our excel worksheets are fairly simple. Mostly outputted text/numbers/dates, a couple of formulas (sum, if) and formatting on the currency and dates.

I've tried several methods to get my excel reports to work:

First I left the excel workbook in the "en-US" culture and tried simply chaging the number format for Brazil to:

_-[$R$-416] * #.##0,00_-;-[$R$-416] * #.##0,00_-;_-[$R$-416] * "-"??_-;_-@_-

And this formatted the regular cells but the formulas still failed to show a value. Instead they showed a 0 value.

Next I tried changing the workbook to the "pt-BR" culture and that also forced me to translate the formula names (Sum -> Soma, If -> Se) but they still wouldn't should a value and instead showed a #Name/#Nome error. Interestingly enough the formulas would work if I edited the cell and hit enter. The formula wouldn't change but it would some how fix that cell.

I need to be able to out excel reports that can format dates/currencies and apply simple formulas (IF, Sum) for other excel cultures. Anyone have any advice?