When working with multilingual data in Excel, saving your spreadsheets as webpages can sometimes lead to unexpected character encoding issues. This is particularly true for languages like Japanese, where characters might be replaced with Unicode entities instead of being displayed correctly. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to ensure that your Japanese characters are properly displayed when saving an Excel 2010 spreadsheet as an HTML file.
The core of the problem lies in character encoding. When you save an Excel file as a webpage, the application needs to translate the characters into a format that web browsers can understand. If the wrong character set is used, characters that are not part of that set (like Japanese characters in a "Western European" encoding) will be converted into Unicode entities (e.g., 飯 for 飯).
To resolve this, you need to instruct Excel to save the webpage using an encoding that supports Japanese characters, such as UTF-8. Here’s how:
UTF-8 is a variable-width character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters. It's the dominant encoding for the World Wide Web, ensuring broad compatibility across different browsers and systems. Using UTF-8 future-proofs your HTML files and reduces the risk of character display issues.
After saving, open the HTML file in a web browser or text editor to verify that the Japanese characters are displayed correctly. You should now see the actual characters (e.g., 飯) instead of the Unicode entities (e.g., 飯).
By following these steps, you can successfully save Excel 2010 spreadsheets as webpages with correctly displayed Japanese characters, ensuring data integrity and readability.
