Why is Excel showing 'c' as the arg separator for fomulas?

Question

In Excel 2007, I have a cell with

"=if(true,1,0)"

as the contents. If I hit the ENTER key I get an error dialog which says, "The formula you typed contains an error."

The flyover help for that cell is shown as

"IF(logical_testc [value_if_true]c [value_if_false])"

. I've checked the language setting for Windows and my separator is still a comma. I also checked on the auto-correction setting of Excel which was blank for ','; I even set ',' to be replaced with ',' to no avail.

If I enter the formula as

"=if(truec 1 c 0 )"

I get the same error dialog. BUT if I try

"=if(true c 1 c 0 )"

it works but when I edit the cell it gets changed back to

"=IF(TRUEc 1c 0 )"

So, why does Excel now think that arguments for formula need to be separated with 'c' instead of ','?

If it matters, this install was an upgrade from Office 2003 but I didn't notice this bug after the upgrade over two years ago.

[Note: I found this issue with a large formula involving Match() and Index() but it shows up with any formula so I've used a simple example above]

Answer 1

According to this article Excel uses the List separator defined in the Windows localization settings.

To change it, open the Region and Language control panel and click Additional settings....

Now change the List separator back to , and it should be fixed.