Special characters are not displaying properly when I open my Shopify CSV export file with Excel or another spreadsheet application. How can I fix this?

This is most likely due to the character set or encoding setting in the spreadsheet application you're using.

You'd want to set the character set to Unicode (UTF-8). LibreOffice and Google Sheets already have these set by default and they'll be able to display the special characters properly instead of showing weird symbols with accent marks.

Excel for Mac unfortunately doesn't support UTF-8.

For Excel on Windows, you can try the following:

  1. Open Microsoft Excel.
  2. Click on the Data menu bar option.
  3. Click on the From Text icon.
  4. Navigate to the location of the file that you want to import. Click on the filename and then click on the Import button. The Text Import Wizard - Step 1 or 3 window will now appear on the screen.
  5. Choose the file type that best describes your data - Delimited or Fixed Width.
  6. Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list that appears next to File origin.
  7. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 or 3 window.
  8. Place a checkmark next to the delimiter that was used in the file you wish to import into Microsoft Excel. The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear based on the delimiter that you chose.
  9. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 3 of 3.
  10. Choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import. You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want.
  11. Click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel.

Source

Free alternatives to Excel that support UTF-8 encoding:

If you're using EZ Exporter, another thing you could try is export the data directly to Excel xlsx format which will already have the encoding set in the file's metadata.


Related Articles:


App: EZ Exporter

Tags: faq, csv, excel