What is Report Culture Awareness, and how does it impact Mail & Deploy reports?

A culture is a set of rules that specify how numbers and dates are formatted (Windows Regional Settings). Generally speaking, the culture defines in what format numbers and dates are being presented to users when they are displayed in the user interface or included in a report. 

However, these culture settings only apply when converting the original datatype (e.g. a date or a decimal) to a textual representation; therefore, not all report types can be culturally aware.

Culture awareness is handled in different report types as shown below:

HTML Reports:
All data that is displayed in HTML reports are represented as text; therefore HTML reports do support culture awareness. Whenever a value of another data type (e.g. a date) is written to the HTML report, it is converted to text first. This conversion process uses the culture of the report.

Microsoft Excel Reports:
In Microsoft Excel, culture awareness is handled by Excel automatically; the values are written to the Excel Workbook in their original data type (thus, no conversion that would require culture awareness is required) and each cell can have a format string that defines how dates and numbers shall be formatted. When a Microsoft Excel Workbook is opened on a computer, the culture of the user (as set in the operating system) will be used to determine how numbers and dates will be displayed to the user. Therefore, Mail & Deploy does not apply culture-specific settings to Microsoft Excel Reports and the option to set culture is not enabled.

Microsoft PowerPoint Reports: 
All data in Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations is represented as text; therefore PowerPoint reports do support culture awareness. Whenever a value of another data type (e.g. a date) is written to the PowerPoint report, it is converted to text first. This conversion process uses the culture of the report.

Microsoft Word Reports:
All data in Microsoft Word Documents are represented as text; therefore Word reports do support culture awareness. Whenever a value of another datatype (e.g. a date) is written to the Word report, it is converted to text first. This conversion process uses the culture of the report.

QlikView Document Embedded Reports: 
When creating a report document from a QlikView Document Embedded Report, the QlikView Desktop Client will do all the rendering and conversions required for the generation of the output Adobe PDF document. Therefore, Mail & Deploy does not apply culture-specific settings to QlikView Document Embedded Reports and the option to set culture is not enabled.

However, even in report types with enabled culture awareness, you have to be careful as to when culture settings made in Mail & Deploy are applied to that report. 

Culture-specific formatting is only applied, if:

• The report type supports culture awareness.
• The value written to the report is in its original datatype.

Example: You want to create a Microsoft Word report based on QlikView document that contains a date field. If you want to write the value of that date field into the report document, you can use a text element that contains an expression that directly references the field of the QlikView Document that contains the date value. If that is the case when evaluating the content of the text element, a value of datatype date will be returned by the expression and needs to be converted to a text value in order to be inserted in the Microsoft Word document; therefore, culture settings made in Mail & Deploy will be applied. If, however, the expression you use as the content of the text element does not contain a direct reference to the field but rather a datasource expression which automatically applies a date format to the value of the field that contains the date, then this expression will already return a formatted textual representation of the date; therefore, culture settings made in Mail & Deploy will not be applied, because of Mail & Deploy treats this value as a text, not as a date.

In reports with enabled culture awareness, the culture will also be applied when converting values in expressions except for conversions that are being done inside a datasource expression.