Guidebook stores text information (such as your schedule sessions) with letters encoded with the popular UTF-8 standard. Microsoft Excel, by default, stores information with the ANSI encoding. This means that when you open a UTF-8 CSV file exported from the Builder website using Microsoft Excel, you may see some unexpected results.
In the example below, we’ve exported a list of four items with the following names: Punctuation, 東京, Québec, and München. After opening the file in Microsoft Excel, only Punctuation is displaying as expected.
Workarounds
In order to avoid any character encoding mishaps you can open your exported UTF-8 CSV file with an application such as Apple Numbers (available for free to all macOS users) or the Open Source program, LibreOffice (available for free to all macOS, Windows, and Linux users).
If you’d prefer to use Microsoft Excel (or if using something else isn’t an option), you can ensure that your data remains unaltered by Importing rather than Opening.
Importing a UTF-8 CSV File into Microsoft Excel
First, launch Microsoft Excel and open a new spreadsheet. Then click on File, followed by Import.
Next, choose the CSV File radio button and locate the UTF-8 CSV file on your computer.
Text Import Wizard Step One
Choose the Delimited option and select Unicode (UTF-8) as the file origin.
Text Import Wizard Step Two
Check Comma as the delimiter and uncheck anything else that may have been selected, then click the Finish button. If you choose to move on to step three you’ll have the option to format the data as a date, number, etc.—this is not necessary for the import process.
You should now have all of the exported data living safely inside of Microsoft Excel. If you plan to re-import this information, please make sure to save in XLS format (Guidebook does not currently support XLSX imports).