For those that cannot or wish not to stop using Excel and have experienced formatting, character encoding and field delimiter problems with save as 'CSV' from Excel, check out this link to a VBA macro that just might solve your issues and/or make existing frequent conversion to UTF-8 tasks a lot more efficient and reliable...
http://vba-corner.livejournal.com/5733.html
I've trialled this a little today and it seems to work exactly as expected. It converts the fields in each record to that expected by EP4 (comma separated, quote enclosed) and appears to retain the UTF-8 encoding (not tested with foreign characters, only 'special' characters).
For reference and background, I previously had Excel output and import via EP4 working fine but I had to open and 'convert to utf-8' via Notepad++ before uploading to ensure I didn't lose formatting/special characters in my 'descriptions'. Although the file wasn't delimited correctly for EP4, i.e., no quotes around values, it did still work.
Hoping this might others.
Cheers
GAM