Incorrect Characters when Opening Unicode CSV Files in Microsoft Excel

Software product name	PerformanceDNA
Version Number	8.5.x and below
Subject	You Encounter Incorrect Characters when Opening Unicode CSV Files in Microsoft Excel

Symptoms

You are using Microsoft Excel to view or analyse data that has been exported from Performance DNA as a CSV file, and your data contains Unicode characters (for example non English characters). The characters appear corrupted or incorrectly when viewed in Excel

Resolution

The issue occurs because Microsoft Excel reads CVS files in non-unicode character sets by default. To prevent this, you should import the file into Excel, rather than directly opening the file.

1. In Excel, click the Data tab, and in the ‘Get External Data’ ribbon/panel, click ‘From Text’.
2. In the Import Text File dialog box, select Text Files (*.prn;*.txt;*.csv) as the file type, browse to the location where you exported/downloaded the CSV file, and then click Open (or Import).
3. In the Text Import Wizard - Step 1 of 3 dialog box, select Delimited, and from the File origin drop-down list, select 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) (or the appropriate language character identifier for your particular environment). In the Preview box below, make sure that your unicode text displays properly, and then click Next.
4. On Step 2 of 3, in the Delimiters section, make sure that only Comma is checked, and then click Finish
5. Finally, select New or Existing worksheet as required, and then click OK