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Problem: When exporting Turkish character encoding into a csv file from an Excel Table (Excel 2013) as a source file I can´t import the resulting csv into QGIS to still displaying the characters correctly . I´m using: "Add Layer" - "Add Delimited Text Layer" and it doesn´t work no matter whether I use as encoding option "UTF-8" or "System".

Result is always: enter image description here

This is possibly rather an excel problem since the problem concerns exporting from Excel. If anyone has any suggestion that would be great, otherwise anyone else reading this with the same problem could try the following workaround.

One possible workaround I use is using Access as an in-between-step:

Importing the Excel-Table into Access retains the special characters. Exporting from Access into a txt or csv file you have the special button called "Advanced options" in the lower left of the export window where you can specify the Encoding of the resulting exported file. If I use "UTF-8" here and then import the resulting csv or txt file into QGIS selecting "Encoding "UTF-8" everything works fine.

Another Question on this site concerns exporting the other way round: Exporting from QGIS to Excel retaining special characters, see here: Export shapefile with "non standard" characters to csv and read in excel

So how do I get Excel to export the characters correctly for QGIS to read them?

My System is Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Language: German (Regional Setting: German)

QGIS Version is 2.12.0 since I haven´t had time to upgrade.

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  • Have you tried using Notepad as an in-between-step? After creating your excel file, copy everything in a notepad file, then choose "save as". Make sure that you change the type of file as "All files", then the name of your file must be prompted like "name.csv". (you must use " " for the filename)
    – Vale
    Apr 15, 2016 at 13:08
  • Ok, just tried this just to know whether it works. It does but when importing the csv-file created using notepa I then had to select "tab" as the delimiter to get the columns correctly. The special characters are still there, which is great. And its not as much work as creating an Access-Database. This is what I did: 1) Open Notepad, copy complete content of Excel sheet + paste into Notepad; 2) Save Notepad file using "show all fileformats" and saving as "name.csv" AND saving in format UTF-8; 3) Importing csv into QGIS, delimiter needs to be set to "tab", encoding can be UTF-8 or "system".
    – Taya
    Apr 20, 2016 at 11:30
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    Since there does not seem to be a solution to the export from excel problem directly do you want to post the notepad option as an answer which I can then accept as a good solution to the problem so the question can be "closed"?
    – Taya
    Apr 20, 2016 at 11:38

1 Answer 1

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Have you tried using Notepad as an in-between-step? After creating your excel file, copy everything in a notepad file, then choose "save as". Make sure that you change the type of file as "All files", then the name of your file must be prompted like "name.csv". (you must use " " for the filename)

EDIT: yes, if you copy directly from Excel the data delimiter is "tab"

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