Excel: Change default encoding (file origin) of Text Import Wizard to UTF-8 (65001 : Unicode)

I am using a variety of tools to regularly prepare data for the web. One stage requires me to open a CSV in Excel, make changes and save the file.

Is there a way to force Excel to accept UTF-8 encoding, and to save its files with that encoding?

I answered a similar question at Default character encoding for Excel Text Wizard?.

I found my answer at Changing default text import origin type in Excel.

1. Close Excel, if it is open.
2. Open the Registry Editor.
3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER → Software → Microsoft → Office → ▒▒ → Excel → Options, where ▒▒ is your version of Office, mostly likely the largest number you see there.
4. Right-click an empty space on the right side and select New → DWORD.
5. Name the item DefaultCPG, and press Enter to save.
6. Right-click on DefaultCPG and select Modify.
7. Set the Base to Decimal.
8. For Value data, enter 65001 to set your default to UTF-8. For some other encoding, use the code page identifier, which you can find in the Text Import Wizard in Excel or in this list.
9. Click OK.

Like Vasille says in the comment to this question, if your file is not actually in UTF-8 format, you may technically want to convert the characters within the file to the encoding you want before opening in Excel. For my purposes, though, UTF-8 does a good enough job of displaying non-corrupted characters.

Not working? Make sure you set Base to Decimal (Step 7).

It seems that Byte Order Mark is required by Microsoft Office software.

1. Using Notepad++, convert the CSV using menu: Encoding -> Convert to UTF8-BOM.

2. Using the sed Unix utility, available in cmder or Git for Windows. See Adding BOM to UTF-8 files.

   sed -i '1s/^/\xef\xbb\xbf/' file.csv
   

• Tested with Excel 2016
• This is what avwtp meant in their answer.

One easy way to change excel ANSI encoding to UTF-8 is the open the .csv file in notepad then select File > Save As. Now at the bottom you will see encoding is set to ANSI change it to UTF-8 and save the file as a new file and then you're done.