Excel has a long-standing CSV UTF-8 encoding issue that can corrupt accented characters during import, export, or edit. The problem is usually Excel's encoding detection, not the data source.

The reliable workaround is to load the file in OpenOffice or Google Sheets, then export CSV with the correct encoding.

When this matters

This comes up frequently when SaaS platforms exchange CSV exports containing names, addresses, product titles, or multilingual content. One bad export/import cycle can permanently damage customer-facing data if nobody keeps an untouched source file.

Step-by-step for OpenOffice

  1. Open your source data in Open Office (Spreadsheet), if it’s in CSV format (text, comma delimited) you will be prompted to select character encoding. By default, it’s set to ‘Western European’. Check the data in the preview window to see if accented characters look OK, if they do… jump to step 3.

  2. If the characters do look corrupted (unexpected capitals or weird symbols in place of lower case accented characters, etc) you will need to change the character encoding. This will usually just be a change to UTF-8 (not UTF-7), but check the accented characters.

  3. Click OK and import the data, it should open and look like a normal spreadsheet.

  4. Now proceed to save it in a correctly encoded format by choosing to Save As (Ctrl + Shift + S) and choosing Text CSV (.csv) from the formats drop down, just above the save button, and sticking to "Use Text CSV Format" in the following prompt box.

  5. Done!

UTF-8 BOM option

Some Excel versions detect UTF-8 more reliably when the file starts with a byte order mark (BOM). If you generate CSV files programmatically, consider writing UTF-8 with BOM for Excel-targeted exports.

In PHP:

echo "\xEF\xBB\xBF";

Then write the CSV content after the BOM.

In shell:

printf '\xEF\xBB\xBF' > excel-export.csv
cat source.csv >> excel-export.csv

Do not add a BOM blindly to every integration feed. Some systems expect plain UTF-8 and may treat the BOM as part of the first header name.

Verification

Before importing into a production system:

  1. Keep the original export unchanged.
  2. Open the converted CSV in a plain text editor that shows encoding.
  3. Spot-check accented and non-Latin characters.
  4. Import a small sample first.
  5. Confirm the receiving system stores and displays the data correctly.

This CSV UTF-8 encoding issue is common wherever SaaS systems exchange exports and imports across different vendors.