2088050 - SuccessFactors: Special characters display incorrectly in User Data File CSV (Excel encoding and import settings)

Special characters (for example, é, è, ô, ï, ê, à, ù, ě, ř, ć) appear as ? or as garbled text like é when opening the CSV in Excel. 

Issue occurs with Employee Export or when viewing the User Data File (UDF) directly in Excel. 

Character loss happens depending on whether the file is UTF-8 or Western European and how Excel imports the file. 

SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite.

1. Export the User Data File (UDF) from Employee Export using encoding UTF-8 (without BOM) or Western European (Windows/ISO). 
2. Open the CSV by double-clicking it to launch Excel. 
3. Observe that special characters display as ? or as garbled sequences such as é.

Excel opens CSV files using a default ANSI/code page that may not match the file’s actual encoding, leading to misinterpreted UTF-8 or Western European characters.

1. Export the file with Character Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8-BOM)
   
   1. Go to: Employee Export
   2. Select Character Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8-BOM)
   3. Click: Export User File
2. If the User Data File is exported with encoding UTF-8 or Western European (Windows/ISO), extract the CSV onto your local machine and follow the steps below to open the CSV file:
   1. The encoding of the csv file is UTF-8 without BOM. If it is opened with NotePad++, you can verify its encoding.
   2. If it is opened with Excel, the special characters are not displayed correctly because Excel opens it with ANSI encoding by default.
3. To make Excel to display it correctly:
   1. In Data menu, select From Text:
   2. Select csv file type in the dialog, and click import button
   3. Select “Delimited” in Original data type, and “65001: Unicode (UTF-8)” OR "1252: Western European (Windows)" in File origin -> Click Next button
   4. Select the Delimiters based on the file separators seen in Notepad++. Typically, CSV file separators are commas however SuccessFactors accepts a variety of separators so adjust this accordingly. (if semicolon, select semicolon, etc..)
   5. Click "Next"
   6. Click "Finish"
   7. Select “New worksheet”
   8. Click "Ok"

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