I converted pdf table to excel format ( Office 2010 ) with ABBYY pdf transformer and try to generate xml file via Excel automation.

All Russian and Belorussian names properly seen in Excel
РУБИНОВ Анатолий Николаевич
Рубінаў Анатоль Мікалаевіч

But after this statement

lcell_value = osheet.Cells(i,j ).value

in Foxpro they are just sequences of "?". I tried to play with strconv , but didn't find a proper combination. My understanding in Excel it is UTF-16, and in xml we should end up with utf-8.