PHP can input and output Unicode, but a little different from what Microsoft means: when Microsoft says "Unicode", it unexplicitly means little-endian UTF-16 with BOM(FF FE = chr(255).chr(254)), whereas PHP's "UTF-16" means big-endian with BOM. For this reason, PHP does not seem to be able to output Unicode CSV file for Microsoft Excel. Solving this problem is quite simple: just put BOM infront of UTF-16LE string.
Example:
$unicode_str_for_Excel = chr(255).chr(254).mb_convert_encoding( $utf8_str, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
