Encoding issues when importing a csv file in Outlook Office Professional Plus 2021

Question

Hello

A strange behavior on Outlook Office Professional Plus 2021 :

As I am French, my contacts contains prominent characters,as é, à,... The header of the fields contain also such characters as Prénom ( = First name)

I export my contacts in a csv file separated by commas. The mapping is correct :

Then without opening and modifying this csv file, I just reimport it in Outlook.

I view the proposed mapping : Outlook does even not recognise the header of the columns :

the first field Titre appears as "Titre" , the second one Prénom as Prénom, and so on.

And the contacts fields are inconsistent :

If I reimport the file, all the contacts are then duplicated whatever the mapping I try and whatever the option I choose about the duplicated items.

I can't understand why there is such a behavior. I am really puzzled by the first field "Titre", because at least this word Titre doesn't contain any special character and should appears without any encoding problem.

Thank you !

Pierre-Yves

Answer 1

Kudos to the folks above. Had the same issue and fixed it this way:

Issue : Import of contacts into Outlook from a CSV file create in Excel is not working and characters that are not from the English alphabet (eg é è à ç in French) are converted to codes during the import.

Reasons :

1. MS support pages indicate to save the file in CVS with UTF-8 format but Excel will then encodes it as UTF-8 BOM which Outlook does not recognize during import. Standard UTF-8 encoding is recognized but it will not reason those characters from other languages.
2. If Windows is not in English, the standard separator in the CSV created can be the semicolon ; in lieu of the colon. Outlook can only recognize CSV with a colon as separator.

Solution

1. Save the file with contacts in Excel as plain CSV format, not UTF-8. !
   
2. Open the CSV file with Notepad to verify which separator is used, and if need be replace separating semicolons by colons. In that case, in order to save and keep as CSV file, you may have to disable ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ in the folder options of File Explorer and then back in Notepad do Save As and replace the .txt extension by .csv. (The file will show as format ANSI in Notepad bottom right corner, which is fine). !
   
3. Do the import in Outlook as described : File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Import from another program or file > etc.