So I was working with a Japanese .xla (Excel add-in) file. I needed to look at something in the source so I fired up the Visual Basic editor within Excel. Upon investigating the form and the various captions it turns out that the Visual Basic editor only displayed them in gibberish (typical decoding issues) or question marks (substituting the .notdef glyph for codepoints). So it seems the Visual Basic editor is either not multi-byte capable (typing directly a string in Japanese into the caption yielded question marks) or it is bound to the locale of the system.

I then remembered AppLocale and fired up Excel through it, setting it to think it is on a Japanese system. Then within Excel I proceeded to start the Visual Basic editor and, sure enough, the text was showing me the Japanese I needed.

I am not sure if I should find this lame or understandable.