Link My Books creates CSV files that are compliant with the UTF-8 standard. We do this to ensure files work well for customers using different operating systems and different software packages to process these CSV files, and to ensure that the processed CSV files can be imported back into Link My Books.
If you use Microsoft Excel to open the CSV files, everything works fine when the file contains just English characters and if your SKUs are not solely made up of numbers.
However, you may run into an issue when your CSV file also contains non-English characters (such as é, ç, ü, etc) or if your SKUs are solely made up of numbers:
Microsoft Excel is unable to properly display UTF-8 compliant CSV files when they contain non-English characters.
Microsoft Excel detects fields that are solely numbers and treats them as a number field, which can cause issues.
To resolve this issue, please do the following after saving the CSV file from Link My Books.
New Excel version 16+
Open a new Excel sheet, select the Data tab, then click "Get Data (Power Query)":
Select "Text/CSV" as the data source:
Click "Browse" to select the file you downloaded form Link My Books:
Find the file you downloaded from Link My Books and select it then click "Get Data":
With the file now selected, click "Next":
IMPORTANT: Select "Do not detect data types" in the Data type detection dropdown:
You should now have a spreadsheet with the imported data but without Excel breaking the formatting required for the intended re-upload to Link My Books.
Remember to "Save As..." the file from Excel to a CSV again before uploading to Link My Books.
Older Excel versions
Open a new Excel sheet, select the Data tab, then click 'From Text' in the Get External Data group.
Browse to the CSV file and select 'Get Data'.
In Step-1 of this wizard:
Select Delimited radio button
In File origin field - select Unicode (UTF-8)
Click Next > button
In Step-2 of this wizard:
Select Comma checkbox
Deselect Tab checkbox
Click Next > button
In Step-3 of this wizard:
Select Text radio button for each column
Click Finish button
Click OK to insert the data into cell A1
You should now have a spreadsheet with the imported data but without Excel breaking the formatting required for the intended re-upload to Link My Books.
Remember to "Save As..." the file from Excel to a CSV again before uploading to Link My Books.
