Excel macro source code character encoding issue

Question

My Japanese colleague created an Excel 2010 macro. When I try to edit the macro in excel, the comments have weird characters. It seems like there is a character encoding issue.

Here is some sample code:

Option Explicit

'ƒtƒ@ƒCƒ‹Ši”[ƒpƒXŽw’è iRow,Col j
'DefineXMLƒtƒ@ƒCƒ‹
Public Const P_stTempRow = 5
Public Const P_stTempCol = 3

I checked to see if there was a way to change the encoding used to interpret the source code but couldn't see any settings.

Answer 1

It is a character encoding issue. The original file was Japanese-localized using the encoding Shift-JIS, but the file is now being interpreted as the US and Western European default encoding of Windows-1252. I do not know a way to make Excel use another encoding for macros other than the localized default, other than to change your "Current system locale" in Windows settings to Japanese.