Excel examples for your work, sports and more.: Calendar 2014 v5 Korean part 1/2

#6 Calendar 2014 v5 Korean part 1/2

Part 1/2 (19-1-2014)

I made a new version (v5) of my Excel Calendar, which is almost the same as v3, except it has a new language, Korean (in stead of the 'dummy-language' HEX, in column 7 of the language table), see fig.1.

The Korean alphabet, Hangul, uses CJK-characters, that is: Chinese characters, which is no problem for Excel (MS Office) since it uses Unicode and UFT-8 encoding, which you can see if you open the xlsx file (core.xml) (with e.g. 7-zip):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="true"?>

fig.1

Here an example of how to write with CJK-characters:

fig.2

Part 2/2 (28-4-2014)

Maybe someone wonders why I made a Korean version the 2014-year calendar. Well, the reason is I was interested to make something in a language with a non-Latin alphabet, so with letters which are not on a 'normal' QWERTY-keyboard. And I choose Korean because I visited some time ago a nice exposition of the ‘Centro Cultural Coreano’ in Madrid about marquetry (inlaid work, paintings made from wood), for some photos I made, see:

https://picasaweb.google.com/103278159654062440102/Corean_Art

And here I also saw a video about the Korean alphabet (‘Hangul’) which seems to have some interesting aspects. Language experts say that Hangul, has a very nice, 'logical' and 'scientific' design and because it uses the principle 'one sound for one word', it is very suitable for voice-recognition software. And they also say on a Hangul-keyboard you can type faster then on a QWERTY keyboard. For more details of Hangul, see:

http://www.koreainformationsociety.com/2013_10_01_archive.html?m=1

Some of the people working in CentroCulturalCoreano helped me with the translations of the names of the weekdays and months in Hangul. I gave them my Excel-file with the calendar, which they opened in their MS Excel (Korean version, see fig.3) and in sheet 1 (Ínfo´), they typed in column 7 of tables 1 and 2 the names of the weekdays and months, using their QWERTY-keyboard. The way to do that is to switch in Windows to keyboard-language Korean and then, by using MS IME, the Windows Input Method Editor, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee418266(v=vs.85).aspx

every Korean character can be made by a combination of Latin-letters, see fig.4 and fig.5 for how to write ‘bike’ (자전거) in Hangul. Fig.5 is made with this Google-app.:

http://translate.google.com/

which is a really great tool, it can translate between almost every 2 given languages, so in this case English and Korean, and besides that it can produce the pronunciation.

As I said in part 1 of this post, Korean-letters use 2–byte Unicode-characters, with which you can make the Hangul-letters you can see in fig.6. I won´t get into details about Unicode, for a good article about it, see:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

but in short: ´special characters’, that is, non-standard (ASNSI) characters, like e.g. ‘ñ’ in Spanish are made with the 2nd byte (the 1st byte is for ANSI-characters) and how this byte is translated depends on the code-page used. For example, a character byte containing the HEX-value 0xA5 is interpreted as the character Ñ on a computer using code page 437 and is interpreted as the yen sign (¥) on a computer running code page 1252. So if you see on your ticket of the (Spanish) greengrocer´s shop the word ‘PI¥A’, instead of ‘PIÑA’ (pineapple), you know that this is the result of using different code-tables in the POS-system of the greengrocer´s shop and the system that delivered the ‘article-price’ table.

Microsoft distributes MS Office (and so MS Excel) in almost all languages (‘localization’), which is great, but in case of Excel, I think it would be easier if the language in formulas would be only English, like for VBA or DAX. Fortunately there are websites with translations for formulas, like this one (Spanish – English):

http://www.xperimentos.com/2007/03/03/tabla-de-traduccion-de-formulas-excel-en-espanol-a-ingles/

To close this post I wanted to thank the people of CentroCulturalCoreano for helping me creating this Korean-calendar in Excel and explaining me a little bit about Hangul, so:
감사 !

Figures (part2):