As part of a recent project I needed to migrate some UTF-8 encoded data from Excel into a MySQL database. Because of the UTF-8 encoding, export to CSV would not work, so I needed to find another way.
Thankfully, a nice person shared some VBA code to export UTF-8 data to a text file. Using this as a start I wrote a quick and dirty macro to dump the data from my spreadsheet to a file, and a PHP script to feed this data into the database. Both parts took less than 1 second each to process a 2200 x 15 cell data set (which was good enough for me, YMMV). 
In the spirit of "share alike" here's the (somewhat cleaned-up) code.
Excel macro (tested with Excel 2007):
Sub export_to_file()
Dim i_current_column As Integer
Dim i_current_row As Integer
Dim i_rows As Integer
Dim i_columns As Integer
Dim s_export_path As String
Dim s_worksheet As String
Dim s_start_cell As String
Dim o_file As Object
s_worksheet = "Sheet1"
s_start_cell = "A1"
i_rows = 100
i_columns = 5
s_export_path = "c:\excel_export.txt"
Set o_file = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
o_file.Type = 2
o_file.Charset = "utf-8"
o_file.Open
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
ThisWorkbook.Worksheets(s_worksheet).Select
ActiveSheet.Range(s_start_cell).Select
o_file.WriteText "" & vbNewLine
For i_current_row = 1 To i_rows
o_file.WriteText "###ROW###" & vbNewLine
For i_current_column = 1 To i_columns
o_file.WriteText "###COLUMN###" & vbNewLine
o_file.WriteText ActiveCell.Offset(0, i_current_column - 1).Value & vbNewLine
Next
ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select
Next
o_file.SaveToFile s_export_path, 2
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub
PHP script (tested with Debian and PHP 5.3.10):
/// CONFIGURATION ///
$db_user = "USERNAME";
$db_pw = "PASSWORD";
$db_name = "DB NAME";
$db_table = "TARGET TABLE NAME";
$data_file = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/path/to/excel_export.txt";
// Define DB column names (order is important)
$a_columns = array('col_1','col_2','col_3','col_4','col_5');
/// NO EDITING SHOULD BE REQUIRED BELOW ///
$db = new mysqli('localhost', $db_user, $db_pw, $db_name);
if($db->connect_errno) {
printf("Connect failed: %s\n", $db->connect_error);
exit;
}
if (!$db->set_charset("utf8")) {
printf("Error loading character set utf8: %s\n", $db->error);
}
$FILE = fopen($data_file, "r");
$a_rows = array();
$row = -1;
$column = -1;
$first_line = FALSE;
fgets($FILE); // skip first row to hack around BOM
while(!feof($FILE)) {
$line = trim(fgets($FILE));
if($line) {
if($line === "###ROW###") {
if($row >= 0) {
// paranoia, probably unnecessary
if(count($a_rows[$row]) != count($a_columns)) {
echo "ERROR: not enough columns!\n";
print_r($a_rows[$row]);
exit;
}
}
++$row;
$column = -1;
$a_rows[$row] = array();
} elseif($line === "###COLUMN###") {
++$column;
$first_line = TRUE;
} else {
if($first_line) {
$a_rows[$row][$column] = '';
$first_line = false;
}
$a_rows[$row][$column] .= $db->real_escape_string($line);
}
} else {
if($first_line) {
$a_rows[$row][$column] = '';
$first_line = false;
}
}
}
fclose($FILE);
$a_sql = array();
foreach($a_rows as &$a_row) {
$a_sql[] = "INSERT INTO {$db_table} (" . implode(',', $a_columns) . ") VALUES ('" . implode("','", $a_row) . "');";
}
unset($a_rows);
$result = fn_transaction($a_sql, $db);
if($result) {
// or add your own error handling / display code here
echo $result;
}
// Simple function to do inserts as a transaction
function fn_transaction(&$a_sql, &$db) {
array_unshift($a_sql, 'BEGIN');
array_push($a_sql, 'COMMIT');
foreach($a_sql as &$sql) {
$result = $db->query($sql);
if(!$result) {
$error = "### SQL STATEMENT ###\n";
$error .= "{$sql}\n\n";
$error .= "### MYSQL ERROR ###\n";
$error .= $db->error;
$db->query('ROLLBACK');
return $error;
}
}
return FALSE;
}
