Character Sets and Collations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 251

There is no problem here when inserting, browsing, or searching for this new author,
as the chosen character set, iso-8859-1 , can deal with the é character.
However, if we switch the MySQL character set to UTF-8 later on, we will have a
problem when browsing the author table:
The same problem occurs when we switch from one language to another, if
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] is set to FALSE , and the two languages are
encoded in different character set. It is therefore highly recommended to avoid
switching character sets if our system is not configured to do the necessary conversion.
Importing and Exporting with Character Sets
If $cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] is set to TRUE , then the File to import section of
the Import sub-pages is modified, so that we can choose a character set for the file to
be imported: