Are there any specific best practices for handling special characters like Umlauts in PHPExcel?

When handling special characters like Umlauts in PHPExcel, it is important to ensure that the encoding is properly set to UTF-8 to avoid any character encoding issues. This can be done by setting the encoding for the PHPExcel object and the output file to UTF-8. 

// Set encoding to UTF-8 for PHPExcel object
$objPHPExcel = new PHPExcel();
$objPHPExcel->setActiveSheetIndex(0);
$objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->setTitle('Sheet1');
$objPHPExcel->getDefaultStyle()->getFont()->setName('Arial');
$objPHPExcel->getDefaultStyle()->getFont()->setSize(12);
$objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->setCellValue('A1', 'Umlauts: äöü');

// Set encoding to UTF-8 for output file
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment;filename="example.xlsx"');
header('Cache-Control: max-age=0');
$objWriter = PHPExcel_IOFactory::createWriter($objPHPExcel, 'Excel2007');
$objWriter->save('php://output');
exit;

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