Issue with Exporting Tables to Excel - Accent Characters Not Displaying Correctly

Product Suggestions
, , ,
1

Hello Tulip Community,

I want to report an issue related to exporting tables to Excel. Exporting tables has always been a great and very useful feature for data analysis. When viewing tables inside Tulip, words with accented characters display perfectly without any problems.

However, for those of us working with text containing accents (for example, many Spanish words), we are unable to export the table data correctly. When the exported file is opened in Excel, accented characters are corrupted or transformed into incorrect symbols.

Below is a list of accented vowels and characters that get transformed after export:

  • á → á / Á
  • é → é
  • í → Ã- / ú
  • ó → ó / Ó
  • ú → (missing or corrupted)
  • ñ → ñ

Sometimes this issue also affects punctuation marks and even spaces:

  • " → â€
  • (backspace) → Â

I share with you some sample txt, you can import it and then export it for testing purposes:

Tulip table.txt (282 Bytes)
CSV Excel.txt (294 Bytes)

image
image1400×357 35.3 KB

This makes it difficult to work properly with the exported data, especially for Spanish texts or any language that uses accents.

Could you please look into this issue or suggest a workaround? Thank you very much for your help!

2

Is there any difference viewing the csv content first in a text editor (e.g. notepad or notepad++)? Or importing from the CSV into Excel without any data transformation?

We have issues with trailing zeros being dropped when Excel “tries to help”.

3

Also you could use “REPLACE” type functions to fix the text, pretty sure there are some existing community articles about that.

4

Thank you for your response,

Using “REPLACE” functions could be a temporary workaround, it’s not a scalable or reliable solution, especially for teams handling large volumes of multilingual data. Also, it would require us to manually identify and clean up each character every time we export a file, which adds unnecessary overhead.

5

I understand that Excel sometimes alters content when opening CSVs (such as trimming leading/trailing zeros), but in this case, the problem seems to be related to character encoding; likely a mismatch between UTF-8 and the encoding Excel expects by default (often ANSI or Windows-1252).