This is not a pure java question and can also be related to HTML I've written a java servlet that queries a database table and shows the result as a html table. The user can also ask to receive the result as an Excel sheet. Im creating the Excel sheet by printing the same html table, but with the content-type of "application/vnd.ms-excel". The Excel file is created fine. The problem is that the tables may contain non-english data so I want to use a UTF-8 encoding. PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel:ISO-8859-1"); //response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel:UTF-8"); response.setHeader("cache-control", "no-cache"); response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=file.xls"); out.print(src); out.flush(); The non-english characters appear as garbage (áéíóú) Also I tried converting to bytes from String byte[] arrByte = src.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"); String result = new String(arrByte, "UTF-8"); But I Still getting garbage, What can I do?. Thanks