I had entered some data in Microsoft Excel file in regional language. I did not have any language pack installed previously. The data was displayed correctly. I saved the file and exited Excel. After some time I reopened that file but the text was gone and the cells were containing garbage values. What should be done?

Edit: I had saved it in csv format.

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1 Answer

The problem most likely is the fact that Excel saves CSV files in ANSI format, and your "regional language" has Unicode characters. There is no way to recover the existing CSV file.

In the future, there are a variety of solutions which you can find by doing a search of the internet or Stack Overflow. Some simple methods include:

• Save in an xl format (e.g. xls, xlsx, xlsm, xlsb)
• Save as Unicode Text. This will create a Tab-delimited file. If you cannot work with that, you can open it with a text editor and replace the tabs with commas.
• Open the xls file in LibreOffice which is free, and has an option to save as CSV with UTF-8 or UTF-16 formatting.
• There are also VBA solutions, but I have not tried them. You will find them when you search the net.

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