in reply to Bulletpoints in spreadsheet being converted to double quotes
I'm guessing that your xls spreadsheet file contains some Unicode characters to convey the bulletpoints. You might want to check out this script I posted here a while back: xls2tsv.
It turns out that Unicode characters in Excel spreadsheets are encoded using UTF-16BE (who knows why…), so once you decode them into utf8, it should look as expected.
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