Is it possible to force Excel recognize UTF-8 CSV

Question

I'm developing a part of an application that's responsible for exporting some data into CSV files. The application always uses UTF-8 because of its multilingual nature at all levels. But opening such CSV files (containing e.g. diacritics, cyrillic letters, Greek letters) in Excel does not achieve the expected results showing something like Г„/Г¤, Г–/Г¶. And I don't know how to force Excel understand that the open CSV file is encoded in UTF-8. I also tried specifying UTF-8 BOM EF BB BF, but Excel ignores that.

Is there any workaround?

P.S. Which tools may potentially behave like Excel does?

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UPDATE

I have to say that I've confused the community with the formulation of the question. When I was asking this question, I asked for a way of opening a UTF-8 CSV file in Excel without any problems for a user, in a fluent and transparent way. However, I used a wrong formulation asking for doing it automatically. That is very confusing and it clashes with VBA macro automation. There are two answers for this questions that I appreciate the most: the very first answer by Alex https://stackoverflow.com/a/6002338/166589, and I've accepted this answer; and the second one by Mark https://stackoverflow.com/a/6488070/166589 that have appeared a little later. From the usability point of view, Excel seemed to have lack of a good user-friendly UTF-8 CSV support, so I consider both answers are correct, and I have accepted Alex's answer first because it really stated that Excel was not able to do that transparently. That is what I confused with automatically here. Mark's answer promotes a more complicated way for more advanced users to achieve the expected result. Both answers are great, but Alex's one fits my not clearly specified question a little better.

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UPDATE 2

Five months later after the last edit, I've noticed that Alex's answer has disappeared for some reason. I really hope it wasn't a technical issue and I hope there is no more discussion on which answer is greater now. So I'm accepting Mark's answer as the best one.

Answer 1

We have used this workaround:

1. Convert CSV to UTF-16
2. Insert BOM at beginning of file
3. Use tab as field separator

Answer 2

This is not accurately addressing the question but since i stumbled across this and the above solutions didn't work for me or had requirements i couldn't meet, here is another way to add the BOM when you have access to vim:

vim -e -s +"set bomb|set encoding=utf-8|wq" filename.csv

Answer 3

1. Download & install LibreOffice Calc
2. Open the csv file of your choice in LibreOffice Calc
3. Thank the heavens that an import text wizard shows up...
4. ...select your delimiter and character encoding options
5. Select the resulting data in Calc and copy paste to Excel

Answer 4

The UTF-8 Byte-order marker will clue Excel 2007+ in to the fact that you're using UTF-8. (See this SO post).

In case anybody is having the same issues I was, .NET's UTF8 encoding class does not output a byte-order marker in a GetBytes() call. You need to use streams (or use a workaround) to get the BOM to output.

Answer 5

It is 2018, and I came from the Future to Bring you the Best and Easiest Answer.

To open the file with just double clicking, that shows the correct characters:

1. Right click and edit the file in Notepad++,
2. Find and selectEncoding->UTF-8-BOM on the top menu then hit save.

You're Welcome. I'll be back in 2025.

Answer 6

Just for help users interested on opening the file on Excel that achieve this thread like me.

I have used the wizard below and it worked fine for me, importing an UTF-8 file. Not transparent, but useful if you already have the file.

1. Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
2. Click on the Data menu bar option.
3. Click on the From Text icon.
4. Navigate to the location of the file that you want to import. Click on the filename and then click on the Import button. The Text Import Wizard - Step 1 or 3 window will now appear on the screen.
5. Choose the file type that best describes your data - Delimited or Fixed Width.
6. Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list that appears next to File origin.
7. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 or 3 window.
8. Place a checkmark next to the delimiter that was used in the file you wish to import into Microsoft Excel 2007. The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear based on the delimiter that you chose.
9. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 3 of 3.
10. Choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import. You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want.
11. Click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel 2007.

Source: https://www.itg.ias.edu/content/how-import-csv-file-uses-utf-8-character-encoding-0