Is it possible to force Excel recognize UTF-8 CSV files automatically?

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

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible. As previously noted by multiple users, there seems to be a problem with excel reading the correct Byte Order Mark when the file is encoded in UTF-8. With UTF-16 it does not seem to have a problem, so it is endemic to UTF-8. The solution I use for this is adding the BOM, TWICE. For this I execute the following sed command twice:

sed -I '1s/^/\xef\xbb\xbf/' *.csv

, where the wildcard can be replaced with any file name. However, this leads to a mutation of the sep= at the beginning of the .csv file. The .csv file will then open normally in excel, but with an extra row with "sep=" in the first cell. The "sep=" can also be removed in the source .csv itself, but when opening the file with VBA the delimiter should be specified:

Workbooks.Open(name, Format:=6, Delimiter:=";", Local:=True)

Format 6 is the .csv format. Set Local to true, in case there are dates in the file. If Local is not set to true the dates will be Americanized, which in some cases will corrupt the .csv format.