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

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) }