Opening CSV Reports With Non-English Text in MS Excel

When opening a CSV report in MS Excel, some non-English characters may not display correctly.

This is because Excel does not correctly detect the encoding of CSV files, and assumes ASCII encoding. In general, MS Excel's support for Unicode text is very poor. Alternative spreadsheet applications such as OpenOffice Calc and KOffice KSpread correctly detect and display CSV files.

If you must use Excel, you can use the following workaround:

  • Save the .csv file as .txt
  • Open the .txt file in Excel. This will bring up the 'import wizard'
  • Choose 'Delimited' data type, and specify an appropriate encoding to match the contents of your report

Categories: Reporting, Translation, International Projects and Localization

Page last modified on August 18, 2008, at 08:25 PM