Display dates in French (months, days)

[Benoit_L]

Hello !

I have created my own calendar table.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/How-do-i-create-a-date-table/td-p/23896

I wish PBI to display the following parts of the date in French but it keeps displaying them in English :

“MonthNameShort”; FORMAT ( [Date]; “mmm” );

“MonthNameLong”; FORMAT ( [Date]; “mmmm” );

“DayOfWeek”; FORMAT ( [Date]; “dddd” );

“DayOfWeekShort”; FORMAT ( [Date]; “ddd” );

Please note that even with the built-in calendar table, the "date hierarchy" displays months in English and I wish to see them in French as well.

I have a French Power BI Desktop Version : 2.55.5010.641 64-bit (février 2018)

I tried to modifiy my regional settings but none worked : neither selecting "operating system default" nor selecting "French".

Thank you for you help !

Benoit

[PaulDBrown]

@Benoit_LI have the same issue, albeit in Spanish, whenever I try to include a date using FORMAT in for example a string. I posted a thread about it, and the solution then appeared to be to dowload the Power BI Desktop version in Spanish (which is a bit of a nuisance). Here is the thread:

Dates inconsistent when using FORMAT

Today, however, I don't even have the option to display dates in DD/MM/YYYY format under the Date type options in the Modeling pane and including a TODAY() function renders the date etc in English (which is not what was happening previously: TDOAY() used to render the date in Spanish). I think this is a bug which has appeared in the latest version of PBI Desktop and which also affects the way the thousands and decimal point indicators are displayed.

It would also be nice if we had the option to choose how dates etc are displayed when publishing to the online service.

Edit: I've just published one of my reports and it seems that the online service respects the language settings (decimal and thousands separator; Dates if not using FORMAT - dates using FORMAT are displayed in English). So it appears the locale settings bug is intrinsic to the Desktop app. Or does the online service apply its own "local" settings?

[Benoit_L]

@PaulDBrown

Thank you for the reply, but none of those ideas work for my issue.

My Desktop as explained was already in French, I tried both parameters (OS locale and French language)

And I looked at the result on the online service, and it's the same (months and days displayed in English)

Surprisingly decimal and thousands separator are correclty using French settings !

[Benoit_L · Accepted solution]

Dear Community, dear @PaulDBrown

I got an explanation from the support / dev team, and it is not a good news 

The FORMAT functions (and all derived) show a language that is one of the DataModel.
The language of the DataModel depends on how the PBIX was created originally.

Your PBIX might have been created on a US/UK machine/setting that make the FORMAT to display English

The bad news is this setting cannot be reverted!

Once the PBIX works you can use this one to rebuild the report.

My own tests confirmed that solution. I just hope using a PBIT template will help me not waste hours of work in rebuilding my whole PBIX.