Opening a unicode CSV file from Excel

[Chris Williamson]

Hi,

I'm currently working on an application that can export data in "CSV"
format, and then launches Excel to view the CSV data. This works
perfectly ok for ascii data.

However now I have upgraded our application to use Unicode I'm running
into problems. When I export data into a unicode CSV file and launch
excel with it's path on the command line I get a "This is not a
recognized format" message. If the same file is opened manually from
Excel the same error is shown but afterwards the text import wizard is
displayed (which works ok).

Currenly the file is 16 bit encoded and does not contain any
characters that aren't found within the standard western character
set, although in the future we would like to be able to write Japanese
or Russian text to the csv file.

Does anyone know any way to open a Unicode CSV file correctly from
Excel?
Currently I'm using Excel 2000. Does Excel XP work any better?

Chris

 

[Jim Rech]

I think the problem is that, by definition, CSV format is not Unicode. So
"Unicode CSV" is an oxymoron. At least until such time as Excel supports
that format. It appears that Excel only recognizes tab delimited Unicode
text files. I don't have a file in your format so I wasn't able to
reproduce the error message you received, but I'd guess that if you changed
the file to some other extension, like maybe TXT, you might not get the
error message but you would still get the text import wizard.

If you send me a small sample file I'll let you know if Excel 2002 or 2003
behave differently.

--
Jim Rech
Excel MVP
| Hi,
|
| I'm currently working on an application that can export data in "CSV"
| format, and then launches Excel to view the CSV data. This works
| perfectly ok for ascii data.
|
| However now I have upgraded our application to use Unicode I'm running
| into problems. When I export data into a unicode CSV file and launch
| excel with it's path on the command line I get a "This is not a
| recognized format" message. If the same file is opened manually from
| Excel the same error is shown but afterwards the text import wizard is
| displayed (which works ok).
|
| Currenly the file is 16 bit encoded and does not contain any
| characters that aren't found within the standard western character
| set, although in the future we would like to be able to write Japanese
| or Russian text to the csv file.
|
| Does anyone know any way to open a Unicode CSV file correctly from
| Excel?
| Currently I'm using Excel 2000. Does Excel XP work any better?
|
| Chris