Excel.vim (opens in new tab)

Taking a piece of software and making all of the UI language localized is one thing. Making sure that your program doesn't blow up if it encounters UTF-8 is another thing. Nowadays if your program chokes on UTF-8, I think it's safe to just consider it broken.

In any case, looks like this is really where the issue may lie:

  # for non-English characters
  def getRealLengh(str):
      length = len(str)
      for s in str:
          if ord(s) > 256:
              length += 1
      return length

          for val in shn.row_values(n):
              try: val = val.replace('\n',' ')
              except: pass
              val = isinstance(val,  basestring) and val.strip() or str(val).strip()
              line += val + ' ' * (30 - getRealLengh(val))
          vim.current.buffer.append(line)

Like other people have pointed out, handling unicode properly does not mean internationalization. Handling utf-8 isn't even difficult if you just keep it in mind.

The notion of non-ASCII characters in user Excel documents IS NOT something rare even for English speaking nations. There are tons of people with foreign names, addresses and other personal information which is commonly stored in Excel documents. And the funny thing is: it's usually not alot of additional work to support UTF-8 if you START correctly.

The problem you will encounter is that most programs (Numbers, Google Docs) do not support XLSB.

Shameless plug: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx supports both XLSX and XLSB (AFAICT the only liberally licensed project that handles the format)