Hello Knackers...
I am new to the system. I imported cxv and got a lot of special characters replacing spaces - ��.
What are these and how can I avoid them. They are making my data look dirty.
I know, right? The exact same thing happened to me the first time I imported data into a Knack app. The solution is mentioned in a great KB article about how to format your CSV for a good import. But the short answer is, Excel spreadsheets don’t use UTF-8 character encoding, and your data needs to have this property.
If, like me, you don’t know how to encode your Excel spreadsheets, there’s an easy workaround. Use Google Sheets, not Excel, to create your CSVs that you’re going to import. Google Sheets is UTF-8 encoded, which prevents the problem you’re experiencing.
If your spreadsheets are already created, you can either import them into a Google Sheet OR if you have a small one, just copy and paste it out of Excel into Sheets. I tried it both ways, and both times it came out right.
Alternatively, if you only have a little cleanup to do, you can fix the characters directly in the builder in your Records tab. Copy the text from a source that shows the special characters correctly and paste it in place of the text showing an error glyph (�).
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Here’s a screen grab of a corrected entry (left) and the one with an error (right.)