Need method to convert Excel to Tab Delimited txt file in Unicode encoding

Question

I have some excel files containing some French characters, for example "Jean-Léon Gérôme" when I convert the excel file to tab delimited txt file, the default encoding is ANSI and the French characters became Gibberish, so I need a method that can convert the excel file to tab delimited file and at the same time in Unicode encoding.

(I know excel can directly export to Unicode text, but that is not what I need, I need the file in tab delimited txt and in Unicode encoding)

Please help. thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Simply saving an Excel file as "Unicode text" saved the file tab-delimited in UTF-16. Here is the result opened in Notepad++. Note that the encoding is "UCS-2 Little Endian" which is a subset of UTF-16. It only supports characters up to Unicode 65535 ( U+FFFF ), but that includes French characters so no worries: