Character conversion errors when exporting to CSV

[Bart Claes]

Hello, I found similar issues in what I was able to find, but that was not the answer.

I want to export my data from Jira to a CSV file.

When there is a quote in a field, it is converted incorrectly.  The question is, is it a Jira problem, or Excel problem?

Open request '00xxxx test request' is used to investigate why this situation occurred.

becomes

Open request ‘00xxxx test request’ is used to investigate why this situation occurred."

[Mohamed Benziane]

Hi Bart, 

Can you try this

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/exported-csv-does-not-display-properly-in-excel-that-contains-non-english-characters-87

I know there is a issue open at atlassian about this trouble

https://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://jira.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile%23issue/JRASERVER-64191&ved=2ahUKEwiJopG8rrDdAhVOxYUKHXFwD9wQFjACegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw3yVXJ2SC6ByYn4Lh8ukd-b&cshid=1536580153593

Hope this helps

Regards

[Bart Claes]

Thanks, the workaround to open in notepad and save again as csv. Then import in excel, that works.  It's an extra step but acceptable :-)

[Barış Baysal]

Hello Bart,

I've come across this thread since I had a similar character distortion problem when exporting my jira issues to Excel. 

In addition to above comments, what worked for me was; I had to open the exported .csv file with notepad and then save it to csv again but only this time I changed the Encoding to "ANSI" while saving. Then opening the file with excel again I found out that the distortion was gone.

[Joe Pitt]

I've run into this problem with several other applications. In every case I could trace it back to copy/paste from a word or other document that had 'smart quotes' instead of the simply ASCII characters from the keyboard. The characters appear fine in the application, but in an exports csv file they end up like yours. By default MS Word has smart quotes enabled. 

[Bart Claes]

Thanks, but in Excel 2016 I cannot find that option for smart quotes. The workaround suggested in the remarks of Mohamed does work, but it's an extra step. Open in notepad and save again as csv. Then import in excel and that works.

[Joe Pitt]

There is no option in Excel for smart quotes. It is in Word. The issue I found was people copy/pasting text with smart quotes into the application. When the export to csv was don't from the database there were the errors you saw. 

[Bart Claes]

indeed ;-)