Change the language of your Office 365 site

As I have been playing with Power BI a lot lately (surprise Smile) there was one thing that took me some time to figure out. I wanted to change the language of my site to hebrew (I wanted to see how SharePoint behaves in certain places). It took some time to figure out how this works. You need to change the language in two different places. You need to start by enabling your site to a specific language, open you site (you need to have admin rights on this site): image

Click on Site Contents:

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Now click on settings, here you can change a lot of different things:

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The thing I am interested in is the Language setting. Here I select any alternate language that my site supports, in this case I chose Dutch (much safer than Hebrew for me Smile, last time I had a hard time getting English back)

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And press OK on the bottom. Now the interesting bit here is that the site hasn’t changed at all .. We have just allowed the visitors of the site to choose this language. Now lets go set the language for me. I select my name in the top right and select about me:

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In my profile I click on edit profile:

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Here I want to select the language settings but it’s a little hidden away, click on the … dots and select “Language and Region: image

This opens the details where I can change the language:

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Here I click add and add Dutch as my first language:

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Now I press “Save all and close”. Now I want to go back to the site, it will take a minute or so for the setting to work: image

The same will also work for you Power BI site.

5 Replies to “Change the language of your Office 365 site

  1. Hi, I wonder if this default language setting is influencing my Power Query SharePoint list connection… it seems to be failing when a website’s default language is Dutch and succeeding when the default language is English…

    1. ill check with the PQ team 🙂
      Update: Yes it is a known issue which they are working on with SP, the workaround is to connect to the sharepoint API using OData, rather than using the From SharePoint option in PQ.

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