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Bulk uploading data with accented characters
Bulk uploading data with accented characters

How to create importable CSV (comma separated values) files when your Excel spreadsheet has special characters

Jason Bekolay avatar
Written by Jason Bekolay
Updated over a week ago

If the data you want to import into Yapp includes accented or non-Roman characters, you may have difficulty exporting a CSV file from Excel with those characters encoded correctly. Excel's CSV export does not always handle this correctly. Here are a couple workarounds for this issue:

Google Sheets

The first option is to import your Excel file into Google Sheets. Once you have it in Google Sheets, you can export a CSV file with the accented characters preserved by going to File -> Download as -> Comma separated values.

Export as Unicode Text

This option can be done just with Excel, but the process is a bit more complicated. Instead of exporting as CSV, you can go to "Save As". In that screen, select "Unicode Text" as the File Type. You will then have to open up the saved file and replace all the tab characters with commas using Find & Replace. Downloading a text editor like Notepad++ would be recommended for this. Finally, you will want to change the file extension for the file from .txt to .csv.

In each case, you should end up with a CSV file with all of the characters preserved. Happy importing!

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