In Office 2003 (and I suppose it's true for Office XP and 2000):

When we save an Excel file to CSV file, Excel doesn't ask if we have to care
about encoding, in particular, I wanted to save Unicode in UTF-8 but I can't.
This is very annoying for multi-national companies which has Excel files
coming from different part of the world.

On the other hand, I tried to edit a CSV to add some Chinese characters in
it and save it in UTF-8 and double-click to open it. Excel is then launched
but it doesn't care file encoding either. The only way to get around
"opening" is to change the file extension from .csv to .txt. Now, if we open
this text file, a wizard will present us the option to choose the file
encoding!!!

Only a little change in file extension and the behaviour is changed. What a
pity that Excel doesn't care about UTF-8.

In Excel 2k3, one of my Save As options is Unicode. I'm admittedly not
up to speed on Unicode and UTF-8 but a quick Google review makes me
wonder: are you mixing your metaphors by saving an XLS file to CSV and
then desiring it in Unicode format? What happens if you go straight
from XLS to Unicode?

What do you mean by "one of my Save As options"??? I have no Unicode
option (or whatever it suggests is) in my "Save As" window. Just a plain
Saving window in which there're only the "Filename" and "Save as type" fields
at the bottom of it. I am afraid the person who made mistake is you, sorry
to say so. I've checked against several Excel 2K3 in my company and they're
all the same. No way to specify Unicode (whatever format) while saving CSV.

"Dave O" wrote:

In Excel 2k3, one of my Save As options is Unicode. I'm admittedly not
up to speed on Unicode and UTF-8 but a quick Google review makes me
wonder: are you mixing your metaphors by saving an XLS file to CSV and
then desiring it in Unicode format? What happens if you go straight
from XLS to Unicode?

Perhaps my mistake was offering to help. Asking again, in a different
way: if saving from .XLS to .CSV doesn't work in the manner you need,
will your foreign offices be able to read your file if you save direct
from XLS format to Unicode format?

Unicode format of what? You mean CSV file in Unicode (UTF-8) encoding? Well,
I'd already written in the first post that it's impossible to do so.

"Dave O" wrote:

Perhaps my mistake was offering to help. Asking again, in a different
way: if saving from .XLS to .CSV doesn't work in the manner you need,
will your foreign offices be able to read your file if you save direct
from XLS format to Unicode format?