Open CSV UTF-8 files (no acces to editing BOM)

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Hi,

I am furious that this has to be so difficult.

 

I am using Office 2016 x64 on Windows 7

 

I have CSV files that can potentially have multiple language characters in them. They are encoded in UTF-8 and separated by commas.

 

I want to be able to double click on them to open them nicely and start working (like OpenOffice.org does).

 

Description

  • I got around Excel not understanding commas by changing my whole Windows default separators (which is dumb, but it worked).
  • I though I could get around Excel not understanding the UTF-8 by changing the registry like they explain here. However, that only changes the Default option of the dropdown called "File origin" in the Import method (Data Tab > Get External Data > From Text). While this is a useful step, it still needs me to go through the menu browsing instead of just double clicking the CSV file in the file explorer.
  • I then said frack it and I resorted to create a Macro for which I would put a custom button on the ribbon. I wrote the following macro, making sure to put "Origin:=65001" BUT IT STILL DOES NOT WORK.
    Sub Open_CSV_UTF_8()
    filetoopen = Application.GetOpenFilename("Text Files (*.txt;*.csv), *.txt;*.csv")
    If filetoopen = Null Or filetoopen = Empty Then Exit Sub
    Workbooks.OpenText Filename:=filetoopen, _
    Origin:=65001, DataType:=xlDelimited, Comma:=True
    End Sub
    When I click my custom button, a dialog box appears to select the CSV file I want to open. I select it and voila it gets opened (alas, to a new file, insted of imported to the current blank workbook) but the characters are still scrambled. Obviously Workbooks.OpenText does not work.
  • I noticed that maybe I could create a macro that would import the data (the the current document) by adding a connection to the file and creating a table from that connection, however, I do not know how to create a macro that would open a dialog box for me to select the file.

Questions

  1. Is there a way to change the Registry for the opening (and not the import dialog) of CSV files?
  2. If not, is there a way to make my first Workbooks.OpenText macro to work as expected (Origin:=65001)?
  3. If not, could yo help figure out a VBA macro for making a connection and open up a dialog box to browse for the CSV file?

Thanks a bunch!!

3 Replies
Does this article help you by any chance: http://jkp-ads.com/articles/importtext.asp

Hey Jan

 

Thank you, but I will not be using one single file for importing but disposable files each time. :S

 

Thanks!

Same article applies, you just click Refresh and Excel prompts for the file...