Some Chinese Characters are unable to display and displayed as ? on Excel

Question

There is issue displaying some Chinese characters on Excel. Upon clicking Data-> From text-> 950 Chinese Transitional (Big 5) as the file origin, some text cant show and displayed as ?. There is no luck displaying Chinese text upon trying different theme font such as MingLiU_HKSCS.

When opening the file on Notepad, the Chinese texts also cannot show, Saving the Notepad encoding as UTF8 could not resolve the Chinese Text display issue. On Windows "Language Preference", both Chinese (Simplified, China) and Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong SAR) have been included.

Answer 1

Hi,

Try opening the file in a text editor like Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code, then switch the encoding under "Encoding" to options like Big5, GB2312, UTF-8, or UTF-16 until the text displays correctly. Once you find the correct one, re-save the file and import it into Excel using Data > From Text/CSV, selecting the same encoding. If the text still doesn’t appear properly, it may have been exported incorrectly from the original system, could you share what program or source the file came from?

kind regards,

Answer 2

Hi,

Here’s the main insight: if the file was exported using Big5 or GB2312, but later opened or saved as ANSI or UTF-8 without BOM, the original byte mapping is lost, that’s why even Notepad shows question marks. You can check this by opening the file in Notepad++, going to Encoding > Character Set, and cycling through Chinese encodings (Big5, GB2312, or UTF-16). If none of them display properly, the text was likely corrupted at export, meaning the only real fix is to re-export the data using a verified encoding from the source system.

Regards,