It's a matter of how the characters are encoded, as Paul wrote. If you double-click on the CSV file, Excel assumes it's ANSI encoded, and will interpret the characters accordingly, which will lead to these results if your file is UTF-8:

If you open the file in Excel using the "Get external data from text" in the Data tab on the ribbon, you can select which encoding you want Excel to assume:

This way you can get a UTF-8 encoded CSV file to import correctly into Excel.

Daniel

It's a matter of how the characters are encoded, as Paul wrote. If you double-click on the CSV file, Excel assumes it's ANSI encoded, and will interpret the characters accordingly, which will lead to these results if your file is UTF-8:

If you open the file in Excel using the "Get external data from text" in the Data tab on the ribbon, you can select which encoding you want Excel to assume:

This way you can get a UTF-8 encoded CSV file to import correctly into Excel.

Daniel

Unknown said:

If you double-click on the CSV file, Excel assumes it's ANSI encoded, and will interpret the characters accordingly, which will lead to these results if your file is UTF-8

Not necessarily... if you encode the file as utf-8 and include a BOM it works just fine.  Try the attached for example.

Christos Papadimitriou.zip

Both files display the chars correctly in a text editor.  But if you double click and open in Excel only the utf-8 file will display correctly.  This is because I added a BOM to the file so Excel knows what to do with it.

Ah, I did not know that. You are right, I just converted my little test CSV to UTF-8 BOM, and it behaves as you describe.

Daniel