This is an old problem but I cannot find it addressed in the Striven documentation or Community.
If you have data that uses any of these commonly used characters - éçàóæøåä&eb;ïüèñôîΩ®©™˜¿¡§£¥€$₹ - when you export your Excel or Google Sheet to CSV, those characters are replaced with seemingly random nonsense. At the least it’s frustrating, at worst it’s in someone’s name and it’s an embarrassing faux pas if it isn’t caught. In my world, it’s mostly price list imports where words like décor, façade, as well as symbols like ®, ©, and ™ are commonly found.
Striven, like most systems, has no problem using these characters, but to get them into Striven requires you to manually place them, as far as I know. There is a potential coding solution that can be used by concatenating a code before each text string, but that’s probably above most people’s ability. These brute force methods can help if you just need to get it done because it’s 2am and you’re out of coffee.
In order to remove unneeded symbols, you can place “=CLEAN(cell address)” in an adjacent column to simply remove the characters. For example, if you want to clean column C, you can insert an empty column D, place “=CLEAN(C2)” in cell D2 and copy down to get clean data in column D. You can either use column D as your new data column, or copy/paste special:values only to column C and delete column D.
If you have letters you can easily replace like turning façade into facade, you can use Find and Replace to easily clean your data.
Finally, if you simply want to check to see if any of those characters exist, in names for example, you can use the Find function, or use CTRL+F when in a browser, and search for individual characters. You’ll need to keep a list of any data that you need to manually fix once it is imported to Striven.
If the Striven folks have an easy fix or workaround for this, please let us know.
