If you think you can detect only cp-1252 i have news for you. This is 1-byte encoding, it can't fit much. So, be prepared for whole zoo of other 1-byte encoding

If you think you can detect only cp-1252 i have news for you. This is 1-byte encoding, it can't fit much. So, be prepared for whole zoo of other 1-byte encodings from that era (e.g. cyrillic letters - welcome to cp-1251, where everything above first 128 chars have totally different meaning). Writing encoding detector is not easy at all. Chance of guessing wrong is high. I'm glad most of the world (but not excel) moved on away from that can of worms > You are suggesting that if software developers willfully refuse to implement it will happen anyway, sooner or later > will result in lots of corruption there are lots of corruption anyway, e.g euro sign, some european letters, whole other alphabets like cyrillic one). The most dangerous are subtle ones like german ẞ) P.S. I don't have office installed to check, but online version exports non cp-1252 chars as "?" . So nice P.P.S. Apple Numbers offers choice of encoding on export, with UTF-8 default. Google Sheets exports as UTF-8 without choice