Decoding HTML Encoding of Foreign Language Text in a Spreadsheet

[TroyWells]

As many do, our company translated our GUI and messages into many foreign languages. I am responsible for editing (the English) and managing translation of these. I recently asked for a dump of all the GUI labels/messages, which they provided in a CSV file. I could easly open this in Excel, and it worked great for most languages. However, for some languages, I just saw text like "عرض ا" which I am told is HTML encoding for the language (in this case Arabic). I know Excel can show Arabic script, but how do I convert this encoding to the actual script? Thanks in advance for your help!!

[TroyWells]

Forgive me for reposting, but I tried in 2 different browsers (Firefox 13, and IE9), and could not get the "Edit Post" feature to work. This is what I was going to edit my post to say: As many do, our company translated our GUI and messages into many foreign languages. I am responsible for editing (the English) and managing translation of these. I recently asked for a dump of all the GUI labels/messages, which they provided in a CSV file. I could easly open this in Excel, and it worked great for most languages. However, for some languages, I just saw text like "#1593;#1585;#1590; #1575;" which I am told is HTML encoding for the language (in this case Arabic). I know Excel can show Arabic script, but how do I convert this encoding to the actual script? Thanks in advance for your help!! (p.s. the funny thing is the first time I pasted some code in above, it actually automatically made it into the script. I removed the "&" from the above in hopes of it staying similar to what I currently see.)

[MartinM]

Do you have the Arabic language pack installed on the PC ?

Also, what happens when you change the relevant cells to an Arabic font ?

[TroyWells]

As best I can tell, I do have the Arabic language pack, and this is not a font issue. I need to convert the HTML encoding to Arabic script, just as happened automatically when I tried my first post in this thread. I just need for that to happen within Excel.