Displaying Japanese text in the Immediate Window of Excel VBA

Question

In Excel 2010, I have a worksheet containing Japanese text. There is no problem editing, or displaying this. When I grab the value of a cell containing Japanese and use Debug.Print to display it in the Immediate Window it appears as ???? This would be a familiar issue if I was dealing with a browser. I would just make sure everything was in UTF-8 encoding. I have Japanese installed on my English Windows and that's all working fine. In Excel I tried to set the default language to Japanese. I changed the editor font to Arial Unicode but so far I still get question marks. I contacted Microsoft. I was passed from one person to another, but they couldn't help. They offered to pass me to a Technical support person who would charge me 500 US dollars!

How can I debug Japanese values in an English version of Excel using the Immediate Window?

Answer 1

The VBA development environment depends on the Windows "system locale" setting to tell it what character set to use. I got it to work using

• Windows Vista (English)
• Excel 2010 (English)

by going into the "Regional and Language Options" section of the Windows Control Panel and setting the system locale to "Japanese (Japan)"

After my system rebooted I could see Japanese characters in the VBA Immediate Window: