Arabic data is not appearing right in excel sheet

Question

I have an excel sheet that contains data that I exported from an Oracle database, and now when I try to open this file from another machine (my laptop), the data appears as strange letters, like Chinese characters, although Arabic is downloaded on my laptop.

How can I read this file?

When you say exported, how did you do that? Are you sure you have the right file? — soandos, Aug 18 '11 at 19:14
@soandos Excel supports many different types of database connections using ODBC — James, Aug 19 '11 at 17:29
I know, but not my question. If he is just trying to read a raw oracle file, it would be unreadable in excel. That is what I am asking. — soandos, Aug 19 '11 at 18:27

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 25 '15 at 15:07

I was having the same problem, and what I was seeing was unknown charcaters like this

????? ???? ????? ????

or like this

ØªÙ…ÙˆÙŠÙ„ Ø¨Ø¯ÙˆÙ† ØªØÙˆÙŠÙ„ Ø±Ø§ØªØ¨

The Solution

Create notepad.txt file
Copy the unknown characters in it, and then hit "ctrl+s" to save the file
Change the extension from .txt to .srt
Open the file using Microsoft Word
It will open with small windows in Word showing the encoding of the original form of the unknown characters, it automatically converts them to understandable Arabic language.
Just in case the if the automatically converting didn't work chose from the encoding list, choose "UTF-8" or "Arabic (Windows)" "Auto Select" and it will convert the unknown characters to Arabic characters
Take the Arabic data copy and paste them back in the Excel file.

Mission Accomplished :D

Arabic data is not appearing right in excel sheet

1 Answers1