Somebody copies text from Word, including the misnamed "smart" quotes, and pastes it into an HTML text box. This text is then sent to a
servlet in your web application, and this servlet uses POI or jXLS to put it into an Excel spreadsheet. Is that an accurate description of the process?
To deal with the browser-to-servlet step,
you should read this article:
Character Conversions from Browser to Database. The saving-to-Excel part is a separate problem and I don't know the answer to that. But to get it working you should not use a complicated thing like a servlet as your
testing tool. Write a small
Java application that just tries to make a simple Excel spreadsheet containing those characters. Which by the way are "\u201c" and "\u201d"; put those directly into your small application, don't try to get them from outside.