Exporting Reports with Special Characters to Excel

In order to support Special Characters such as French accented letters, euro symbols etc SmartSimple uses UTF-8 encoding throughout the system, including when reports are exported.

When opening files Microsoft Excel always imports using ASCII, so special characters encoded using UTF-8 do not appear correctly. This is a flaw with Excel. In order to export data containing special characters to Excel use one of the procedures outlined below.

Copy and Paste from Notepad/Wordpad

• Configure the report to export with txt as the file extension
• Export the report
• Open the report in Notepad or another text editor.

• You may need to right-click on the file and select Open With depending on what application your PC is configured to use for .txt files.

• Select and Copy the entire text of the report (Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C)
• Open a blank worksheet in Excel
• Select the top-left cell and paste the text you copied (Ctrl-V)

Note: Notepad will not open very large reports, so another text editor such as Wordpad or Notepad++ should be used. Microsoft Word is not recommended.

Import Data

• Open a blank worksheet in Excel
• From the Data menu select Import External Data followed by Import Data

• This will vary slightly depending on your version of Microsoft Excel. Check the Microsoft Website or Help Menu in Excel for assistance.

• Browse to the location of the exported report .txt file and click Open
• Select Unicode (UTF-8) as the File Origin and click Finish (UTF-8 normally appears near the bottom of the list)

• Choose the cell you wish to place the data and click OK.