How to fix text encoding in Excel?

Question

Character encoding

How to fix characters in Excel? Recently found that search does not find plain text in Excel.
Those. I type in the search "Alena" (and there are a lot of cells with this name), writes nothing was found. But when I insert the text just copied into the buffer from the cell into the search bar, it is magically located. I tested all this in notepad ++, it turns out that it also does not find the text copied from the cell if you then type it manually in the search bar.
Empirically, through urlencode, it turned out that the first letters of the words in the cell are in a different format. Those. e.g. if it says "Alena Tolbukhina", then the letters A and T are in ascii format, as I understand it, and the rest are in unicode. I don’t know how it works in Excel, but it’s a fact (maybe I just copied the text from some bad site, I don’t remember).
Through the URL-encode, the following is obtained:
Α - %CE%91
A - %D0%90
Τ - %CE%A4
T - %D0%A2
On the toaster, by the way, you can see that these characters even look different.
Now I can't convert these letters to unicode.
I insert the character Α in notepad ++, click "convert to UTF-8", save. But the old format still remains. Those. I run this character through urlencoder.org and still get %CE%91. How to convert everything to unicode?

Answer 1

Replace Α with A.
More specifically, Α with А Or Greek alpha to Russian A.
Someone notably tried to obfuscate your data table. In fact, it has normal UTF8, only some of the letters are Greek. They must be caught and replaced with Russians.