Get Excel to properly display accented characters in .CSV files

Why Accented Characters May Display Improperly

GiveCampus creates CSV files that are compliant with the UTF-8 standard. We do this to ensure that it works well for our partners using different operating systems and different software packages to process these CSV files.

If you use Microsoft Excel to open the .CSV files, everything works fine when the file contains just English characters. However, you may run into an issue when your CSV file also contains non-English characters (such as é, ç, ü, etc):

• Microsoft Excel is unable to properly display UTF-8 compliant CSV files when they contain non-English characters.

How to Resolve Improperly Displaying Accented Characters

To resolve this issue, please do the following after downloading the CSV file from GiveCampus.

On a Mac:

Use the "Numbers" application instead of Excel.

On a Windows machine:

Method 1: Notepad

• On a Windows computer, open the CSV file using Notepad.
• Click "File > Save As".
• In the dialog window that appears - select "ANSI" from the "Encoding" field. Then click "Save".
• That's all! Open this new CSV file using Excel - your non-English characters should be displayed properly.

Method 2: Excel Options

• On a Windows computer, click "File > New" in Excel.
• Click "Data" tab.
• Then click "From Text" option. Select the CSV you file you saved from Accompa.
• Excel will display "Text Import Wizard".
• In step-1 of this wizard:
  • Select "Delimited" radiobutton.
  • In "File origin" field - select "65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)".
• Click "Next >" button.
• In step-2 of this wizard:
  • Select "Comma" checkbox.
• Click "Finish" button.
• In the dialog window that appears - click "OK" button.
• Excel will display your CSV file - including non-English characters - properly.