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I am talking about importing CSV files in UTF8. If I use Japanese characters for example it fails utterly to display properly unless I import it as "Text" first.

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The secret trick for importing data into Excel (without actually writing a file in the Excel file format): don't try CSV - as you have already noticed that will fail in all kind of fragile ways depending on your character encoding and operating system locale. Instead, convert your data into an html table and then paste or import that into Excel.

But not any html table, you need to have the appropriate proprietary css properties in there, such as the mso-data-placement:same-cell. Those are actually documented ...in the Office HTML and XML Reference published in 1999.

I frequently go from SQL query results to HTML table to excel in a similar manner, but I haven't had issues w/ any proprietary CSS properties. Using Paste Special -> Match Destination Formatting it always comes out without any issues

No, you should use the Data import tools--that's what they're there for!

Yes, it takes a little longer, but you should use Data > From Text/CSV for more complex text/delimited imports.

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