Troubleshooting Accented Character Display in CSV Reports

Symptom

Opening a CSV export report using Microsoft® Excel can cause accented characters (Unicode characters) to display incorrectly. Characters like é, ç, or ü may not appear correctly.

Cause

This error is due to a limitation of Microsoft Excel's handling of these characters and filetypes.

Solutions

Use a different program

Using a different application can resolve the issue. 

To do this, open the file in a different program such as a text editor (for example, Notepad, EditPad, or Sublime) or another spreadsheet program (for example, Apple Numbers).


Change the encoding in Excel

You can change the character encoding while importing the .csv file to resolve this issue.

To do this:

  1. In Microsoft Excel, click New in the File menu.
  2. Select the Data tab.
  3. Click From Text and select the CSV file.
  4. Select Delimited.
  5. For File Origin, select 65001 : Unicode (UTF-8).
  6. Click Next.
  7. Select Comma.
  8. Click Finish. 

Excel will import the CSV contents and display the characters correctly.

Change the encoding in Notepad

You can use a different program to change the character encoding for the file.

To do this:

  1. Open the .csv file in Notepad.
  2. In the File menu, click Save As.
  3. In the new window that displays, select ANSI for Encoding.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Open the file in Microsoft Excel. The characters should now display correctly.