CSV

You export a CSV from a bank portal, a shop backend, a lab instrument, or a colleague’s Mac. You double-click it. The columns are right, the text is wrong: Müller shows as Müller, Café as Café, apostrophes turn into ’, and a column of Japanese or Greek names becomes rows of ????? or empty boxes. Nothing has been corrupted. Excel read every byte correctly and then decoded them as the wrong character set. That is a fixable mistake — but it has to be fixed in the right order, because one of the obvious moves destroys the data for good. ...