How to export your excel file to a UTF-8 Format encoded CSV?

Overview

Exporting your Excel file to a UTF-8 encoded CSV ensures that special characters are preserved correctly. This is required for our Import Tools. Follow these steps to save your file in the desired format.

• Windows
  • Excel 2016 - 365
  • Excel 2013 - 2007
• Mac
  • Numbers
  • Google Sheet

Windows

Excel 2016 - 365

In Excel 2016 and later versions, you can directly save a file in CSV format with UTF-8 encoding:

1. In the target worksheet, click File > Save As or press the F12 key.
2. In the Save As dialog box, select CSV UTF-8 (comma delimited) (*.csv) from the Save as type drop-down menu.
3. Click the Save button. Done!
   

Excel 2013 - 2007

Older Excel versions do not support UTF-8 encoding directly, so you’ll need to save your document in Unicode Text format first, and then convert it to UTF-8.

To export an Excel file to CSV and preserve special characters, follow these steps:

1. In your worksheet, click File > Save As or press F12.
2. In the Save As dialog box, choose Unicode Text (*.txt) from the Save as type drop-down menu, and click Save.
   
3. Open the .txt document using your preferred text editor, such as Notepad.
   
   Note: Some simple text editors do not fully support all Unicode characters, so certain characters may be displayed as boxes. In most cases, this won’t affect the resulting file. You can ignore this or use a more advanced text editor like Notepad++.
   
   
4. Since the .txt file is tab-delimited and we aim for a comma-separated file, replace the tabs with commas. Here’s how:
   • Select any tab character, right click it and choose Copy from the context menu, or press the Ctrl + C key combination.
     
   • Press Ctrl + H to open the Replace dialog box.
   • Paste the copied tab (Ctrl + V) in the Find what field. The cursor will move rightwards, indicating that the tab is pasted.
   • Type a comma in the Replace with field and click Replace All.
   • If you want a semicolon-delimited CSV, then replace tabs with semicolons.
   • If you want a semicolon-delimited CSV, replace tabs with semicolons. If done correctly, your resulting .txt file should look similar to this:
     
     
5. In Notepad, click File > Save As and make three important changes:
   • In the File name box, change the .txt extension to .csv.
   • In the Save as type box, select All files (.).
   • In the Encoding drop-down menu, select UTF-8 with BOM.
   • When done, click the Save button.
     
     Tips:
   • If your text editor does not allow changing the file extension, you can do that in Windows Explorer.
   • If your file is intended for use in another application where the UTF-8 format is a must, do not make any edits or save the file in Excel, as this may cause encoding problems. If some data does not appear correctly in Excel, open the file in Notepad and fix the data there. Remember to save the file in the UTF-8 with BOM format again.

Mac

Numbers

1. Click on File > Export To > CSV
   
2. For Text Encoding: Select Unicode (UTF-8) from the dropdown menu
   
3. Click Next
4. Save!

Google Sheets

Import Excel file

1. Click on File > Import
   
2. Go to Upload and choose your xlsx file
3. Hit Import data
   

Export csv

1. Go to the File menu > Download > Comma-separated values (.csv, current sheet).
2. After clicking on that option, your file will be automatically downloaded to your computer