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I downloaded a spreadsheet that has Cyrillic in it, and LibreOffice display is as gibberish.

I have Cyrillic enabled; I can open a new spreadsheet and type Cyrillic and it displays just fine. I tried changing the font, but that didn't produce readable text.

I opened the spreadsheet in a text editor (it's just XML) and the encoding is UTF-8 and I can actually read the Cyrillic text.

Update:

I played with the file a bit. No matter what format I save it in, I still get gibberish. I think I might've looked at something else when I thought I can open it as a text. I think that was individual invoices I downloaded. They came down as pdfs but for each item I also got an xslt / xml pair of files.

Here is a copy of the file with the data stripped. I put "Test" in cell A1 to show that Cyrillic works on my system:

File

Any ideas?

NotTheDr01ds
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ventsyv
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    there are language packs for this. sudo apt install libreoffice-l10n-ru I think that will do what you want – j0h Mar 01 '25 at 23:47
  • By any chance, can you post a small sample of the document? Might be helpful, so people could experiment locally. – Hi-Angel Mar 02 '25 at 13:30
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    @j0h i installed it but that didn't fix it. I think those are localizations for the software so menus etc can appear in Cyrillic. – ventsyv Mar 08 '25 at 18:43
  • @Hi-Angel I'm adding a copy of the file. I stripped all the data and save it as xls, which Calc says is Excel 97-03 format? XLS was the original extension, but I doubt they used that old of a Excel format... Also before I could open the file in a text editor and could see the markup. Now it appears the format is binary? In any case the content is the same. – ventsyv Mar 08 '25 at 18:47
  • When I open your link to the file, it says "the file has been deleted". By any chance, did you not give permissions to view it? You can check if it's visible to other people by running a browser in "private mode" and opening your link. – Hi-Angel Mar 08 '25 at 19:33
  • @Hi-Angel sorry, I saved it in a xslt format and removed the old one. Try it now. – ventsyv Mar 08 '25 at 19:39
  • I wonder if the encoding is screwed up. Maybe it's using Windows-1251 and Calc thinks it's UTF or something? – ventsyv Mar 08 '25 at 19:51
  • Thanks! I tried it, and, well, I kind of doubt the file is correct to begin with. You see, it has this gibberish together with word "Тест" which renders just fine. It would seem gibberish should've been everywhere, not in just one place. More over: I have locally tested with LibreOffice and Only Office; and additionally, the DropBox interface has file preview as well. That is 3 different software that shows gibberish in the file. This begs a question: is there even an office implementation that would render the file fine…? – Hi-Angel Mar 08 '25 at 19:53
  • @Hi-Angel I type the "Test" in cell A1 - just to prove to myself that Libre "understands' Cyrillic. As for your question - no I've not been able to render it in any software - I've only tried Libre and the Dropbox interface though - I don't have MS Office. – ventsyv Mar 08 '25 at 20:02
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    I understand why you typed тест. My point was rather that I doubt that the file format has ability to set encoding per cell. Well, I'm not an office dev ofc, but it would seem allowing to set encoding per cell is enough of a corner case to not be considered useful. My point is, encoding is likely set per document, not per cell. And if you see тест rendered fine and other text isn't, note that all of it is likely rendered with the same single encoding. If this is true (which it may not be, I'm just speculating), then no office, including MS one, would be able to render this correctly. – Hi-Angel Mar 08 '25 at 20:09
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    @Hi-Angel Found online people complaining that the new version (at the time - this was like 15 yrs ago) of Excel doesn't render old xls files correctly. Wrote some python code that converts it to new open Excel format but the data is still gibberish. I think you are right and the file is messed up. I'll mess with the encoding to see if I can get it unscrambled. – ventsyv Mar 10 '25 at 20:13

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