I wrote a simple checker for all encodings types. My data included problematic signs in headers so I use

df.info()

function to check if everything is correct.

import pandas as pd

codecs = ['ascii','big5','big5hkscs','cp037','cp273','cp424','cp437','cp500','cp720','cp737','cp775','cp850','cp852','cp855',
          'cp856','cp857','cp858','cp860','cp861','cp862','cp863','cp864','cp865','cp866','cp869','cp874','cp875','cp932','cp949',
          'cp950','cp1006','cp1026','cp1125','cp1140','cp1250','cp1251','cp1252','cp1253','cp1254','cp1255','cp1256','cp1257','cp1258',
          'euc_jp','euc_jis_2004','euc_jisx0213','euc_kr','gb2312','gbk','gb18030','hz','iso2022_jp','iso2022_jp_1','iso2022_jp_2',
          'iso2022_jp_2004','iso2022_jp_3','iso2022_jp_ext','iso2022_kr','latin_1','iso8859_2','iso8859_3','iso8859_4','iso8859_5','iso8859_6',
          'iso8859_7','iso8859_8','iso8859_9','iso8859_10','iso8859_11','iso8859_13','iso8859_14','iso8859_15','iso8859_16','johab','koi8_r','koi8_t',
          'koi8_u','kz1048','mac_cyrillic','mac_greek','mac_iceland','mac_latin2','mac_roman','mac_turkish','ptcp154','shift_jis','shift_jis_2004',
          'shift_jisx0213','utf_32','utf_32_be','utf_32_le','utf_16','utf_16_be','utf_16_le','utf_7','utf_8','utf_8_sig']


for x in range(len(codecs)):
    print(x,': Now checking use of:', codecs[x])
    try:
        df = pd.read_csv('*your_csv_file*.csv', header = 0, encoding = (codecs[x]), sep=';')
        print(df.info())
        print(input('Press any key...'))
    except:
        print('I can\'t load data for', codecs[x], '\n')
        print(input('Press any key...'))

Remember about giving a sep parameter it also helps.

I suppose if your Excel opens the data the case isn't with encoding. You can get its's encoding importing 'locale' and asking locale.getpreferredencoding(). Look at header row while opening data in text redactor to find out if any field has escaped characters like '\t' and also look at a csv delimiter (the default in read_csv is ',', your may have another)