Character encoding and Blender

During a Blender load, you may run into issues when Employee Names contain special characters (such as accented letters). The characters on these records will return unrecognisable - usually displayed as a question mark in a diamond box:

This is because by default, Excel exports csv files using old encoding called Windows-1252.

To get around this issue, you can Save As the csv file with the encoding type 'UTF-8':

However, this may not be possible in older versions of Excel where UTF-8 is not an option in the dropdown list. If this is the case, then you will need to follow these steps:

• Click on the Save As button
• To the left of the Save button, you will see Tools - click this and choose Web Options:

• Select the Encoding tab and save the document as Unicode (UTF-8):

Once this encoding has been selected, the Blender load will recognise the special characters, and they will appear as expected.