Friday, November 28, 2008

Unicode Madness

Dear Diary,

I have spent almost an hour this morning, trying to receive data from an Excel file, in order to print labels on another program (the program is called "Mail Factory" and believe me is the best one out there for doing the job), so that I could mail Christmas cards to customers.

What I found out is that when I tried to import the data, all text was corrupted. What I didn't know was that Excel actually does not export UTF-8 text (since my customers are actually Greek I obviously need to get unicode text).

So, I managed to find a solution and maybe I can help others to avoid this problem (I forgot to say that I work on Macintosh).

The solution is pretty simple: Open your Excel file in NeoOffice (free opensource suite. You can download it here --> www.neooffice.org) and export it as .CSV file (comma separated values). Then the application finally lets you choose your preferred encoding, so you set it on Unicode UTF-8 and all your text will appear properly.

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