Dear Dieter, hello again! I am glad to inform you that I have found the solution to my problem ... hidden to the Custom - display all possible options: eg. Export >> Custom - display all possible options >> (change to these vars) 1) Output: Character set of the file: iso-8859-7 2) Format: CSV for MS Excel Like this it works great!!! Kind regards, Barbara. ________________________________ From: Varvara Kapourani [mailto:vkapourani@action.gr] Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 12:16 PM To: &#39;ruleant(a)users.sourceforge.net&#39; Subject: Problems after <<Remove native Excel export modules (xls and xlsx formats)>> Importance: High Dear Dieter, Hello! I need help with the excel export on from phpMyAdmin version: 3.4.5 Until 2 days before I could export my db tables to excel 2003 (or 2007) just fine, with no encoding problems, as the data stored in that tables contains greek characters. Unforunately, from yesterday, that "excel 2003" export option is not available in the drop-down menu and it really makes my work difficult. I have contact our hosting provider and they didn t help me at all, as they told my that this was a result from the "cpanel automatic updates" and they can not do anything. I have asked them to roll back this update, as I really need the functionality of "excel 2003" export, but I took no reply. So, as trying to find a solution, I found your name in the "List of changes" of phpMyAdmin - Remove native Excel export modules (xls and xlsx formats). I hope I am not disturbing the wrong person; can you please help me? The options available now are exporting the data with wrong encoding - I can not read anything. I also try to change the excel encoding but no luck. I can export to CSV >> open with notepad++ >> improt to Excel 2003 >> and it works BUT it is so much effort and time consuming - it is not practical at all, as exporting db tables to excel 2003 is the 50% of my job!!! Please, can you help me? Is there a way to have back the option: Export to 2003 in the export options of phpMyAdmin? It would save me so much time and effort on work. Or is it something that I could do to fix the export encoding problem (for greek), from the available "CSV for MS Excel" option? I have windows xp professional sp3 and microsoft office 2003. Thanks in advance. Hoping to a quick reply! Kind regards, Barbara.