Interspire Product Knowledge Base

It is important to ensure that your CSV file is encoded with the same character set that Interspire Email Marketer is in (UTF-8 by default).

Unfortunately Microsoft Excel has trouble saving CSV files with a UTF-8 encoding. Another tool to use is OpenOffice.org Calc (which is similar to Excel and free).

To change a CSV file to use UTF-8 encoding with OpenOffice.org Calc, follow these steps:

1. Open your CSV file in OpenOffice.org Calc with its original encoding, e.g. Western Europe (Windows-1252/WinLatin1).
2. Verify that your special characters are appearing properly - if they are not, try another encoding when you open the file.
   
3. Go to File -> Save As and save the CSV file as an ODF Spreadsheet (in the 'Save as Type' drop-down).
4. Go to File -> Save As again and save the ODF file as a CSV again (Text CSV).
5. If you are prompted to Keep Current Format or Save in ODF Format, elect to Keep Current Format.
6. You will now be prompted to choose the character set, so choose UTF-8 from the drop-down.

The newly saved CSV file will now have a UTF-8 encoding, with all the special characters converted properly. You can then upload the file to Interspire Email Marketer and it will preserve the special characters.