Way back in 2012, while working on a project, I had the requirement of uploading data containing Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese etc. characters in Salesforce. The data to be uploaded was available in Microsoft Excel format. However from Excel, when I tried to save the data in CSV format a lot of characters were converted to ‘ ? ‘ (question mark) resulting in the loss of data. Earlier Excel did not allow us to specify the encoding of the CSV file (when this blog post was originally written back in 2012).
So here is the revised solution to this kind of requirement:
- Once you have the data in Excel format, save the file as ‘CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)’ (this option is available in Excel)
- Launch the Data Import Wizard in Salesforce and select your file to Import and the Encoding in the drop-down list. This could be either in UTF-8 or UTF-16 format, depending on the selection you used when saving the CSV file.
- Import data in Salesforce from the CSV file
AMAZING !!!!!!!!