Typically the biggest problem is saving from Excel to UTF-8 since it really really wants to just use its locale-dependent default charset. Opening is trouble to

Typically the biggest problem is saving from Excel to UTF-8 since it really really wants to just use its locale-dependent default charset. Opening is trouble too, but people are occasionally good about noticing that and figuring out how to get to the import options... the re-conversion to a different charset on save happens transparently so people don't notice. In recent versions there finally seems to just be a new "UTF-8 CSV" option in the Save As dialog.