Why am I seeing strange characters in my report?
A "character encoding" is the system a computer uses to interpret and represent different characters. At Attendee Interactive, we receive Abstracts from all over the world. We selected "UTF-8" as our character encoding system, since it knows how to interpret a large range of characters, from scientific and technical symbols, to glyphs of many different languages. By default, Microsoft Excel opens files with Microsoft's own character encoding, which is much more limited than UTF-8. Because of this,there are a number of characters that Microsoft doesn't know how to represent properly. If you open a CSV Report with default settings, any character that Microsoft doesn't know how to read gets spit out as gibberish.
How can I fix them?
When opening CSV Reports, make sure to select UTF-8 when opening the file in Microsoft Excel. Detailed steps are outlined below.
Microsoft Windows:
1. Open Microsoft Excel, and select File > New Workbook.
2. With a blank worksheet open, select File > Import…
3. Select "CSV File".
4. Select the report you downloaded and would like to open.
5. Choose "Delimited", under 'File Origin' choose the option closest to "UTF-8", and click "Next".
6. For Delimiter, select "Comma", and unselect all other checkboxes.
7. Click Finish. Click Ok.