Special Character Formatting - Unicode Characters

StriveScan's export file is a CSV file. It contains exactly the same information as the student entered, which may include special characters in that student's language. When the file is opened by various programs, certain special characters may not be supported.

Problem

If you scanned students in at a fair in a region where special characters, diacritical marks, or accents are commonly used in that language's alphabet, and the file appears to be garbled or has incorrect or strange characters, follow the instructions below:

Opening in Excel can cause issues

Users commonly encounter this issue when opening the StriveScan export file in Excel. Excel does not handle the encoding of certain characters very well. These universal characters are an international standard called "unicode" and allow for the different diacritic characters commonly used in the Turkish, Vietnamese, and many other non-English alphabets. 

Technical explanation: Excel reads CSV files in non-Unicode character sets by default.

When Excel encounters these characters it replaces the characters with alternate ones that are not appropriate. 

Solutions

1) Don't use Excel

Instead, import the file into your CRM. Most CRMs are able to handle unicode characters in CSV files better than Excel.

2) Use Excel, but rather than just opening the file normally, you must import the data and tell Excel the file uses Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Follow these instructions: How to import a .csv file that uses UTF-8 character encoding (external site)

3) Use a different spreadsheet program other than Excel  

Google Sheets and Numbers for Mac can read CSV files using unicode better than Excel.

4) Use a text editor

Plain text editors like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Macs will open the file properly.