title: Pandas read _excel: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte
body: <p>Trying to read MS Excel file, version 2016. File contains several lists with data. File downloaded from DataBase and it can be opened in MS Office correctly. In example below I changed the file name.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> file contains russian and english words. Most probably used the Latin-1 encoding, but <code>encoding='latin-1'</code> does not help </p>
  
  <pre><code>import pandas as pd
  with open('1.xlsx', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
          data = pd.read_excel(f)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Result:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 14: invalid start byte
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Without <code>encoding ='utf8'</code> </p>
  
  <pre><code>'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 622: character maps to &lt;undefined&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>P.S. Task is to process 52 files, to merge data in every sheet with corresponded sheets in the 52 files. So, please no handle work advices. </p>