3353470 - Common Issues With CSV Files in Data Workbench and Mass Data Maintenance

Issue

Cause

Resolution

Characters with umlauts and other special characters (e.g. ö, ü, ß, ä) are not displaying correctly in the exported CSV file.

Excel automatically uses the data format ANSI to open files. The server creates the CSV file with the data format UTF-8 if it uses Unicode. If the UTF-8 format CSV or text file is opened by Excel, then multi-bytes characters become unreadable.

You can either:

1. Open the CSV file using the Excel Import Wizard and specify UTF-8 or UTF-16 as the File Origin;
2. Open the file with a CSV editor other than Excel.

Please note: all visible UTF-8 characters are supported — that means that control characters are not supported.

When attempting to import a CSV file using Data Workbench, you receive the error message "Error due to unsupported formatting in the CSV file" or "Invalid file format".

On Mass Data Maintenance, you may see message "File could not be Parsed Successfully".

These errors may be caused because your file is in different encoding format than UTF-8. Both Data Workbench and Mass Data Maintenance only accept files in UTF-8 format.

Additionally, when using Linux or Mac, it might be related to the end of line control characters. Linux uses LF (line feed) and Mac uses CR (cartridge return), while the system expects the CR+LF type, standard in Windows.

There are many ways to convert the file to UTF-8 encoding. You may use the program of your preference and which is approved by your company's IT directory, but here are the instructions to do it with Notepad++:

1. Go to Menu and select the option Encoding;
2. Select the option Convert to UTF-8;
3. Now save the file on Menu > File > Save as;

Give a name for the file and add the CSV extension (e.g. filename.csv).

A file which you exported from Data Workbench or Mass Data Maintenance is being rejected after you update it and try to re-import it, with an error such as "Invalid Date Format".

If you're opening the file with Excel, the auto-formatting functions may be changing the date format from SAP's format to Excel's (dates are being changed from YYYY-MM-DD to D/MM/YYYY, currency is being changed from USD to US Dollar, etc.)

You can either:

1. Open the CSV file using the Excel Import Wizard and specify the Column date format as General;

Open the file with a CSV editor other than Excel.

When attempting to import a CSV file using Data Workbench, you receive the error message "Upload error; Unsupported file format".

This error message may be occurring because you are trying to upload a CSV-Migration-Template to Data Workbench.

The Data Workbench tool only accepts CSV files from its own work center (from Download Metadata in Import view, exported from Export view or templates created in Templates view).

The CSV-Migration-Template is a special type of CSV template, accepted exclusively in the Migration tool.

To avoid the error message, please use the CSV templates downloaded using the button 'Download Metadata' from each Object in the Data Workbench work center, templates downloaded from Export view and/or the templates created in Templates view.

When attempting to import a CSV file using Mass Data Maintenance containing the special character ", some letters following this character are removed from the text (most likely the letter L).

The special character " has character utility and has a specific meaning in the mass data maintenance code logic, so this behavior occurs because Mass Data Maintenance mistakes the characters " in the CSV template with the character logic applied in its code.

To avoid this behavior we recommend avoiding the use of the special character " in Mass Data Maintenance. However, as a workaround after validation, you can input the text again for the lines which have the special character " in it.