Pulling reports that contain special characters may result in corrupted or unreadable spreadsheets. This occurs because we scrape the data as unicode (unprintable) text, but Excel reads CSV files in non-unicode by default.
There are a few easy steps you can follow to ensure you can download your Excel sheets that would usually have unicode characters in Excel. Alternatively, we also recommend you use Google Sheets or other free programs such as Numbers or Tadviewer which should be able to view the CSV file correctly.
Download a Thinkific CSV Report
Start by downloading one of Thinkific's CSV reports:
Configure Excel
Now you can configure Excel to use unicode on your exported CSV reports:
- In Excel, click the Data tab, and in the Get External Data ribbon/panel, click From Text.
- In the Import Text File dialog box, in the lower-right corner (to the right of the File name box), select Text Files (*.prn;*.txt;*.csv) as the file type, browse to the location where you exported/downloaded the CSV file, and then click Open (or Import).
- In the Text Import Wizard - Step 1 of 3 dialog box, select Delimited, and from the File origin drop-down list, select 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) (or the appropriate language character identifier for your particular environment).
- In the Preview box, make sure that your unicode text displays properly, and then click Next.
- In the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 of 3 dialog box, in the Delimiters section, make sure that only Comma is checked, and then click Finish.
- In the Import Data dialog box, select New worksheet (or Existing worksheet if you have one), and then click OK.
You now have a properly formatted (and unicode-friendly) Excel worksheet.