Re: UTF-8 problem (XLS)

[Nick Lamb <njl tlrmx org>]

On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 11:04 -0300, John Coppens wrote:
> The origin of the strange characters in the file still unclear. These xls
> files are sent to my wife's pharmacy monthly with updates.

It would be interesting to know some things if you have access to MS
Excel on Windows or Mac or to the (zero cost) Microsoft Excel viewer
program on Windows and time to experiment.

* Do these characters appear visually to be the same in Excel as in
Gnumeric when you load the file ? I get the impression from previous
emails that the answer is "No", but I'm not quite clear.

* If you re-save the Excel file (perhaps slightly alter the text in one
cell to make sure you're really saving a new file) from Excel does it
make a difference to the strange characters when imported into
Gnumeric ?

The former would tell us whether Excel itself can figure out what's
going on here and get the right characters (in which case Gnumeric can
probably learn how to do the same) and the latter would tell us whether
perhaps the file sent to the pharmacy is non-standard in some way while
the same data when saved by Excel itself can be read correctly.


Might you be able to make (a copy of) the file available to one of the
developers to look into further? Of course you can't do this if it's
data about pharmacy customers but if it's just a product list or
something it might be possible for someone to assure you that they'll
keep it confidential.

Nick.