Data Table CSVs Imported from Excel

Hi all,

So I’ve been working with Data Tables a lot recently to handle easy management and import of all kinds of things that appear in our game across multiple versions and languages. Everything works great exporting to CSV from Excel (the document I hold everything in for convenience) and import it into Unreal. The only problem is special characters, things like: è or å, always come out as ? inside Unreal.

This has already been reported for UE-19896 but is backlogged since the easy workaround is to use Google Sheets (which works, amazingly well and would make it simple to distribute the sheets for our language and project teams to edit) but the company has a policy against Google and their products (why, I don’t know). I’m trying to convince them to let me use them for these Data Tables since it is so much simpler. If not, then I’ll essentially be stuck with updating the ? manually. That’s fine when the language has one random special character here or there, but for something like Japanese it will be a lot of extra effort.

Just trying to get this bug more attention again to see if it might get fixed.
On the outside, does anyone know why Excel > CSV is somehow different from Sheets > CSV. The two files, when compared, are the same size, everything reads the same, the only difference comes after import.

Thanks.
Kyle

Looks like a character set issue. You checked your settings on CSV export dialog?

This is an ancient issue and has nothing to do with UE4. Excel cannot save csv in UTF-8 encoding. Interestingly enough, Microsoft acknowledged it in July this year and a fix has been on the way since then…

I have not tried this myself but I’m almost sure that Libre or Open Office will produce more desirable effects. Any chance you could give those 2 a try?