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?

Solution

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

• ????? ???? ????? ????

or like this

• تمويل بدون تحويل راتب

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

Comments

[soandos]

When you say exported, how did you do that? Are you sure you have the right file?

[James]

@soandos Excel supports many different types of database connections using ODBC

[soandos]

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.