[QGIS-Developer] Loading many Excel-Files in QGIS with correct encoding

[Andreas Neumann]

> Isn't this limitation ultimately that GDAL isn't reading the encoding
> correctly? (Or perhaps it's a limitation in the underlying freexl
> library...)

Yes - I also assume it is a limitation of OGR or FreeXL. I was hoping 
that some secret OGR opening option, environment variable or sidecar 
file could do the trick ...

Never mind - I found a solution to convert my hundreds of .xls to .xlsx 
(with VBA code in Excel) and when I load the .xlsx, the encoding is 
loaded fine in QGIS.

For reference: here is the VBA-Code for the batch conversion in Excel: 
https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/1349-excel-batch-convert-xls-to-xlsx.html#a2

In general, I think that the handling of spreadsheet file loading in 
QGIS could be much improved - similar to the plugin "Spreadsheet Layers" 
from Arnaud 
(https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/SpreadsheetLayers/version/2.0.1/).

My assumption is that Excel/Openoffice files are so popular among our 
users that it would really nice if we could improve the situation 
susbstantially. Otherwise we are always forcing our users to save the 
spreadsheet files to CSV first - which has a lot of loading options, but 
has it's own limitations.

Thanks anyway - my problem is now solved by previous conversion of the 
files to .xlsx.

Andreas
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