How can I get Excel to properly display special characters in the data export?

Your bookers may have used special characters when filling out the booking form (such as é, ç, ü,etc). When you export the booking data, you will find these special characters are rendered incorrectly in Excel because Microsoft Excel is unable to properly display UTF-8 compliant CSV files when they contain non-English characters.

To resolve this issue, please do the following after saving the CSV file from your bookings export.

On a Windows machine:

Method 1

• 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

• 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" radio button.
  • 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.

On a Mac:

Use the "Numbers" application instead of Excel.