Why Report Downloads Display Random Symbols in Excel

When you download a report from the ContactMonkey dashboard and open it in Excel, emojis and special characters like smart apostrophes can appear as strange symbols such as ’, é, or similar garbled text.

Cause: This happens due to a character encoding mismatch. All of ContactMonkey's reports are exported using CSV UTF-8 encoding (which supports international and special characters), but Excel is opening them using a different encoding, like Windows-1252 (ANSI). When Excel misinterprets the byte sequence, it displays incorrect characters.

For example:

• The smart apostrophe (’) is stored in UTF-8 as three bytes
• Excel reading those bytes as Windows-1252 incorrectly displays them as ’

How to Fix Character Encoding Issues

Option 1: Import the CSV with UTF-8 Encoding (Recommended)

Instead of double-clicking to open the CSV, use Excel's import wizard:

1. Open Excel and create a new blank workbook
2. Click Data at the top
3. Click Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV
4. Select your ContactMonkey report
5. In the import dialog, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8)
6. Click Load

This ensures Excel reads the file with the correct encoding from the start.

Option 2: Import the CSV into Google Sheets

1. Open a new file in Google Sheets
2. Click File → Open
3. Click Upload
4. Click Browse
5. Select your ContactMonkey report