What's the best way to export UTF8 data into Excel?

Question

So we have this web app where we support UTF8 data. Hooray UTF8. And we can export the user-supplied data into CSV no problem - it\'s still in UTF8 at that point. The proble

Answer 1

After struggling with the same problem for a few hours I found this excellent post on the subject

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/ quote :

So, these are the three rules for dealing with Excel-friendly-CSV:

1. Use tabulations, not commas.
2. Fields must NOT contain newlines.
3. Use UTF-16 Little Endian to send the file to the user. And include a Little Endian BOM manually.

However, if you're using ruby, you problem is solved: first you have the FasterCSV gem

but i ended up using the spreadsheet gem which directly generates excell spreadsheets (i have link limitation, just google spreadsheet + rubyforge) Brilliant !

Answer 2

I found that if you set the charset encoding of the web page to utf-8, and then Response.BinaryWrite the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF) at the top of the csv file, then Excel 2007 (not sure about other versions) will recognize it as utf-8 and open it correctly.

Answer 3

If you create an XML with utf encoding and save it as a .xls it will open even those two-byte chars:

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"

Answer 4

I fell on this post looking for the Ruby answer to why Excel wouldn't properly load a CSV with utf-8 characters. After searching around and experimenting this solution worked for me:

csv_content = CSV.generate(col_sep: "\t", headers: :first_row, encoding: 'utf-8') do |csv|
  csv << ["header1", "header2"]
  csv << ["content1", "content2"]
end
write_content = Iconv.conv("utf-16le", "utf-8", "\xEF\xBB\xBF")
write_content += Iconv.conv("utf-16le", "utf-8", csv_content)
File.open("listing.csv", 'wb') {|f| f.write(write_content) }

Answer 5

Try OpenOffice Calc - it's much more Unicode friendly - both Importing and Exporting CSV files with UTF-8 encoding.

Answer 6

You're forgetting creating an OleDB datasource and Excel Interop, but there are issues with those as well.

I recommend the SpreadsheetML option. It works pretty well, odds are your platform has some decent tools for building xml files, and it's fully supported as far back as OfficeXP. Office2000 is not supported, but personal experience is that it works in a limited way.