Why am I seeing strange characters in my report?
A "character encoding" is the system a computer uses to interpret and represent different characters. At Attendee Interactive, we receive Abstracts from all over the world. We selected "UTF-8" as our character encoding system, since it knows how to interpret a large range of characters, from scientific and technical symbols, to glyphs of many different languages. By default, Microsoft Excel opens files with Microsoft's own character encoding, which is much more limited than UTF-8. Because of this,there are a number of characters that Microsoft doesn't know how to represent properly. If you open a CSV Report with default settings, any character that Microsoft doesn't know how to read gets spit out as gibberish.
A "character encoding" is the system a computer uses to interpret and represent different characters. At Attendee Interactive, we receive Abstracts from all over the world. We selected "UTF-8" as our character encoding system, since it knows how to interpret a large range of characters, from scientific and technical symbols, to glyphs of many different languages. By default, Microsoft Excel opens files with Microsoft's own character encoding, which is much more limited than UTF-8. Because of this,there are a number of characters that Microsoft doesn't know how to represent properly. If you open a CSV Report with default settings, any character that Microsoft doesn't know how to read gets spit out as gibberish.
How can I fix them?
When opening CSV Reports, make sure to select UTF-8 when opening the file in Microsoft Excel. Detailed steps are outlined below.
Microsoft Windows:
1. Open Microsoft Excel, and select File New Blank Workbook.
2. With a blank worksheet open, select Data From Text/CSV.
3. Select the report file you downloaded and would like to open.
4. From the pop-up screen, 'File Origin' - select the option which contains "UTF-8", Delimiter = Comma.
5. Click LOAD.