Converting an Excel file with special characters to a CSV with these preserved

Question

I am trying to convert an Excel spreadsheet that contains some special characters such as "ñ" which are not preserved when I save as a CSV file using the simple 'save as > csv' approach in excel.

Is there a method for doing this that will preserve these characters?

Thanks, Simon

Answer 1

I came across this issue recently when trying to import into mysql.

There are a couple of ways round it, but you are best to create your own delimiters then save it as standard text.

Depending on how many columns there are - you might want to do this a number of ways, but one way or another at the end of your data do A1 & "," & B1 & "," etc - or you could use the iterative functions to make it do this for you by dragging down.

Once you have this string - put an equals at the front and it should concatenate the lot.

You can then move all rows to a new sheet and save as text. You'll have a pure csv, without any of the nasty unicode problems that often occur.

Hope that helps