encoding - What charset does Microsoft Excel use when saving files?

Question

I have a Java app which reads CSV files which have been created in Excel (e.g. 2007). Does anyone know what charset MS Excel uses to save these files in?

I would have guessed either:

• windows-1255 (Cp1255)
• ISO-8859-1
• UTF8

but I am unable to decode extended chars (e.g. french accentuated letters) using either of these charset types.

Answer 1

From memory, Excel uses the machine-specific ANSI encoding. So this would be Windows-1252 for a EN-US installation, 1251 for Russian, etc.