How to set character encoding when opening Excel

Use the import function under "Data" tab where Excel allows us to specify the encoding. Select "from text" and choose your csv file then Select Japanese shift-jis encoding.

The following steps work with Office 2003.

1. Rename .csv to .txt
2. Open .txt file from Excel (don't do it with right click on file then open with Excel), Excel will open a Text Import Wizard dialog, ask ask for the format of .txt file, including character encoding of text file.
3. Rename .txt back to .csv after your edit is finished.

On Excel 2016 for Mac:

1. create blank worksheet,
2. in main menu go to Data -> Get External Data -> Import Text File,
3. follow steps in wizard - choose the encoding until you will see the correct preview and on the next step choose columns delimiter (delimiters differ from csv to csv files).