Troubleshoot your exported CSV file in Excel

Unexpected characters appear in Excel 

You received a report or exported a file with your contacts and when you open the file you see weird characters (such as Ã,¥, é, ç, ü, etc)? 

The file you exported/downloaded is a CSV file. This is done because users work on various operating systems, and they are using different programs. However, sometimes importing CSV into Excel and result in accented characters due to a different encoding set in Excel.

The issue can be resolved in Excel with this solution:

1. Your file should be open in Excel.
2. Click on the Data tab.
3. Click From Text/CSV and select the CSV file (the file that you are currently working in).
   
   
   
   
4. For “File origin”, select 65001 : Unicode (UTF-8.). A CSV file with UTF-8 encoding will show any characters in the Unicode standard. 
   
   
   
   
5. For "Delimiter", select Semicolon
6. Click Load

All data is in one column

Once you open a CSV file, all data could appear in one column separated with commas, and sure that makes it hard to read. This might be a result of your computer's regional setting, and not a problem with the exported data. But a short solution would be to import the CSV file into and Excel. Just like in the previous solution this can order your data in separate columns. 

1. Open Excel.
2. Enter the Data tab.
3. Choose From Text/CSV.
4. Select your file and click Load. 

Dates 

If you exported a date filed from Loopify but you want all of the dates to be with another date format, you can do that in Excel.

1. Select the cells you want to format.

2. Press CTRL+1. 
   You can also right-click on the cell and from the menu choose Format Cells. 

3. In the Format Cells box, click the Number tab.

4. In the Category list, click Date.
   
   

    

5. Under Type, we recommended the US English format and the March 14, 2012 formatting to get it imported correctly. 

Note: If you need to format a number into a phone number then:

1.  From the Category box, click Special.
2.  In the Type list, click Phone Number.