PHPExcel file "corrupt" when Unicode in data -

i've been using phpexcel months now. have users entering unicode data, , reports not opening in excel.

the exact error excel 2010 gives is: excel found unreadable content in 'blahblahblah.xlsx'. want recover contents of workbook? if trust source of workbook, click yes.

clicking yes... file corrupt , cannot opened.

when view files (turn .zip , open .xml contents), can see formatted. utf-8 characters show in text editor (an accented "o" shows xc3 single item), encodings seem kill excel.

i've noticed unicode used in both cells , sheet names.

the solution i'm going use (though not perfect):

  function phpexcel_unicodefix($value) {      //data seems utf-8, despite internal encoding     // $iconv = iconv_get_encoding();     // $it = $iconv['internal_encoding'];     //such $it == 'iso-8859-1'      //but iconv($it,"ascii//translit",$value) doesn't work (data utf-8?)      //excel not accept utf-8?     $value_fixed = iconv("utf-8","ascii//translit",$value);      return $value_fixed;   } 

i tried many combinations of iconv() before found work. thought utf-8 valid phpexcel, wasn't working. conversion isn't perfect, readable.