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Format Data and Display Special Characters in the Downloaded Report

Overview

The data may not be formatted when you download a CSV file. Depending on your application, the default delimiter might not be a comma (our reports use a comma as the delimiter). In addition, special characters, such as é, ç, ü, etc., can be present in the downloaded report. These may render incorrectly in applications such as Microsoft Excel because Microsoft Excel cannot correctly display UTF-8 compliant CSV files containing non-English characters.

To resolve this issue, follow our suggestions based on your operating system.

What Do You Need?

  • Numbers or Microsoft Excel
  • A downloaded report in CSV format

Format Data

On Apple MacOS:

Use the Numbers application instead of Microsoft Excel because Numbers automatically handles and displays special characters without issues.

On Microsoft Windows:

Note

We used Microsoft Excel 2019 for creating the below instructions. The process might be different if you use a different version of Microsoft Excel.

  1. In Microsoft Excel, go to File → New → Blank Workbook.

  2. In the Data tab, go to Get Data (Power Query) → From Text (Legacy) and select the downloaded report. The Text Import Wizard appears.

  3. In Step 1 of the Text Import Wizard, ensure that the Delimited radio button is selected. Then, from the File origin drop-down menu, select Unicode (UTF-8).

  4. Click Next.

  5. In Step 2 of the Text Import Wizard, select the Comma checkbox and click Next.

  6. In Step 3 of the Text Import Wizard, select the data format for the columns and click Finish. The Import Data dialog box appears.

  7. Select if you want the data in the existing or new sheet, and click OK.

    Microsoft Excel now displays the report correctly.