You mean the page that eff_i_g linked to... that's good to know. The full explanation that you quoted for the "* 1." return value is indeed pretty silly. Better to describe that as "single-byte encoding (typically cp1252, but possibly some other single-byte code page)".

The notion of a "compressed UTF-16 character string where all of the high order bytes are 0 and are omitted to save space" is nonsensical, but if it made any sense, it would actually be referring to "ISO-8859-1", but since Excel is a M$ product, I would expect this to be cp1252 (or similar) instead, using code points in the 0x80-0x9f range for various punctuations marks, etc (whereas ISO-8859 has them as "special control characters" that are all non-displayable).