UTF-8 encoding issue of 2 columns in Excel workbook

Question

I have an Excel workbook that I need to edit but when I open it 2 of the columns have strange encoding (I think). Instead of normal values (strings) there are these strings:

¼àãëåíäðîáèëèöàêðàòêîáðîä

and

ÏÅËÈÑÒÅÐ-ÁÐÎÄ-ÄÐÎÁÈËÈÖÀ

I checked the document encoding (which is UTF-8), everything is written with Arial font, and there are no restrictions (I think) or hidden columns. I can edit all the columns but I need to get a normal value for these 2 columns to continue my work. I already tried saving the document with different encoding, tried Google Spreadsheet and tried changing language for non-Unicode programs in Control Panel but unfortunately nothing helped.

Is there a way to get their normal value?

This spread-sheet was probably created with a different font, one you don't have on your machine. A non-Unicode font, not uncommon in India. You'll need to know where the file came from. — Hans Passant, CommentedOct 17, 2012 at 22:17
I've tried putting local fonts but it doesn't change anything, I know the origin of the file so I also tried Cyrillic encode but it also didn't change anything. Also I think that if a font is missing there will be a warning when starting the file. — PKb, CommentedOct 17, 2012 at 22:53
thank you pnuts, can you tell me how did you converted them in their normal form? — PKb, CommentedOct 18, 2012 at 23:45

NorthCat · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-20 18:20:01Z

Excel might be interpreting your textual data as latin-1 or windows-1252, and not UTF-8. Is there an option for input encoding when you do an import?

I was able to fix formatting issues like this with Open Office's export/import functionality.

I think there is no option for input encoding, also the content of the columns I copied into notepad and there i started to change the encoding but it gave no result. — PKb, CommentedOct 18, 2012 at 8:47

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