When a Perl program I had written had some encoding issues with spreadsheet data a customer fed to it, I asked if he could email me the Excel spreadsheet so I could have a look.
Read the rest of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and UCS2 data.
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Thank you for taking the time to document your findings. I was having exactly the same problem with a spreadsheet originally generated as a Google doc with cut-and-paste names from various nationalities.