I think Joost and polypompholyx are on the right track for the answer to this question, but it sounds like the OP is wrestling with character set challenges beyond just Perl, based on the description of "cutting/pasting" and "previewing". In essence, one needs Excel, the text editor, and the console (if that's where things are being printed) to all be "speaking" the same character encoding (and have a font that supports it, too) -- or at least one needs to take into account the differences between all these variables. Even if one gets the encodings right in Perl, the results could still look strange when viewed in some other program (console or editor). The OP will need to do more research into the unicode/character-code support of all the other links in the chain.