Characters look wrong in Excel

Accented or non-Latin characters look wrong because Excel opened a UTF-8 CSV with the wrong encoding; export as Excel (.xlsx), or import the CSV with File origin set to 65001 UTF-8, or open it in Google Sheets.

Names and addresses with accents or non-Latin characters (for example Æ, å, ñ, 北京) come out of Exportify correctly. If they look like Ã¥ or ? when you open the file, the program opening the file is reading it with the wrong character encoding. Nothing is wrong with the export.

Why characters look wrong in Excel

Exportify writes CSV and delimited text files in UTF-8, the encoding every modern system expects. Excel, however, guesses the encoding when it opens a .csv by double-click, and on many computers it guesses a regional Windows encoding instead. Excel files (.xlsx) do not have this problem because the encoding is part of the file.

How to fix wrong characters in Excel

1. Easiest: use the Excel format. In the template, set the Output format to Excel (.xlsx). Characters open correctly every time, and dates and numbers are typed as well.

2. Or import the CSV instead of opening it. In Excel, start a blank workbook, then use Data, From Text/CSV, choose the file, and set File origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) before loading. Excel then reads it correctly.

3. Or open it in Google Sheets or Numbers. Both read UTF-8 CSV files correctly without any settings.

Do not save over a mis-read file

If a CSV was opened with the wrong encoding and then saved, the wrong characters are now in the file. Run the export again to get a clean copy.

Exports for systems that need another encoding

Some older warehouse or ERP imports insist on a specific encoding such as Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1. Support can set that on a support-managed template; tell us the encoding the receiving system documents.

What’s next

• Choose a file format