Forum Discussion
Opening CSV file with UT8-encoding (65001) as default for csv files.
Hello,
I am trying to open a csv file, that contains Arabic characters. In most cases, it will render the Arabic Character as unreadable characters (as shown in the image below). Those scenarios, include opening the file by double clicking, saving it again as CSV with UTF-8, or converting it to XLSX, all of which result in the same thing as the first image.
The only I found to actually make it render them correctly by following this:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/opening-csv-utf-8-files-correctly-in-excel-8a935af5-3416-4edd-ba7e-3dfd2bc4a032
Which does allow me to select utf-8 encoding.
Other CSV viewers don't have that issue. It would be convenient to have away to make this behavior the default. In my organization we have thousands of employees, and the fact they have to open Excel, go to the Data section, select import CSV, select the encoding, then click importing for every single CSV file we have is very annoying, we deal with thousands of files per month.
The second Image is for another file:
Here is the file in case anyone want to try to open it.
Please note we need to support as old as Excel 2016 for any solutions.
The CSV files are generated from Power Automate Flows, and we would really like to avoid any sort of conversion between the formats online (Though I don't mind if I can embed let's say, a character or so at the end of the file to make Excel open it correctly) as our experience has been very slow for anything Excel related in Power Automate (if for example we use Excel to generate the files instead of CSV, it would take around 3 hours for each file at least, compared to 5 minutes in CSV).
Best,
Ali A.