Fixing Garbled Characters in Shopify CSV Import & Export
The quick answer: Shopify’s product-import and order-export CSVs are all UTF-8, so Shopify almost never breaks your accents — the damage happens in the middle, in Excel. Open a Shopify export by double-clicking, or save an import file as plain “CSV (Comma delimited)”, and Excel treats it as Windows-1252 (ANSI). That turns Gaussé into Gaussé, a bullet or a € into strange symbols, or worse, into a literal ?. The good news: garble like Gaussé is reversible because the bytes are intact. The bad news: a ? means the character is already gone. Here is how to keep UTF-8 all the way through.
Symptom, cause, and fix at a glance
What you see tells you whether the data is recoverable. Match your symptom to the row below before you do anything else — two of these are fixable in seconds, and one means you have to go back to Shopify.
| Symptom | What happened | Fix |
|---|---|---|
Gaussé, €, odd punctuation | A UTF-8 file was read as ANSI (Windows-1252) — mojibake, bytes still intact | Reverse the mojibake, then re-save as UTF-8. Recoverable. |
Literal ? where accents should be | Saved as ANSI; the character was not in Windows-1252, so it was replaced | Data is lost — re-export from Shopify. |
| Everything fine in Google Sheets, broken only in Excel | Excel double-click assumed ANSI; the file itself is fine | Open via Data → From Text/CSV as UTF-8. |
Why Excel breaks a UTF-8 Shopify file
Excel guesses the encoding, and on a double-click it usually guesses wrong. A CSV is plain text with no header that announces its encoding, so a program has to assume one. Shopify writes UTF-8, where an accented letter such as é is stored as two bytes. When Excel opens the file as Windows-1252 it reads those two bytes as two separate Latin-1 characters — à and © — and you get Gaussé. The euro sign, curly quotes and bullet dots each become their own little cluster of symbols. Nothing is broken in the file; you are simply looking at correct bytes through the wrong lens. That is why this class of problem, called mojibake, can be undone.
The destructive step is the reverse trip. Saving from Excel as plain “CSV (Comma delimited)” writes Windows-1252, which can’t represent every character Shopify can. Anything outside that set becomes a literal ?, and at that moment the original character is discarded for good.
Saving a product CSV for Shopify without losing accents
Use “CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)”, not plain CSV. Excel 2016 and later ship a UTF-8 save option; it is the single most important setting when you are preparing an import file.
- Prepare your rows in Excel, accents and all —
Gaussé,€, curly quotes. - Open File → Save As and click Browse.
- In Save as type, choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (.csv) — not the plain CSV (Comma delimited) entry just above or below it.
- Save and upload to Shopify. Because both sides are UTF-8, accents survive the import unchanged.
If your Excel is older and has no CSV UTF-8 option, edit and save the file in Google Sheets instead, which always exports UTF-8. There is a fuller walkthrough in our guide to saving an Excel file as CSV UTF-8.
Opening a Shopify export in Excel without breaking accents
Don’t double-click the export — import it and tell Excel it is UTF-8. A double-click hands the file to Excel with no encoding choice, which is exactly when it defaults to ANSI.
- Open a blank workbook, then go to Data → From Text/CSV.
- Pick your Shopify export file.
- In the preview window, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and check that the accents now look correct.
- Click Load. The data comes in clean, and if you save it back, use CSV UTF-8 as above.
Already staring at Gaussé? Reverse it in your browser
If a file has already been mangled into mojibake, you don’t have to re-export — the bytes are still there. Our free tool detects the UTF-8-read-as-ANSI pattern and rewrites the file with the correct characters, entirely on your device with nothing uploaded.
Open the broken-characters fixer →Editing in Google Sheets keeps UTF-8 throughout
The simplest way to avoid the problem is to never let Excel touch the encoding. Google Sheets reads and writes UTF-8 at every step, so a Shopify export opened in Sheets shows Gaussé correctly, and a file downloaded from Sheets as CSV goes back to Shopify as UTF-8. Importing the Shopify CSV into a Sheet, editing there, and exporting straight back is the safest round trip — there is no ANSI stage in it. It also explains why a file can look perfect in Sheets yet garbled in Excel: the file is fine, and only Excel’s reading of it is wrong.
What is recoverable and what is gone
Mojibake is reversible; question marks are not. When you see Gaussé or €, every original byte is still in the file — it was just decoded with the wrong table, so re-decoding as UTF-8 (with our character-repair tool, in Google Sheets, or via the import method above) restores it perfectly. See why é shows as é and similar cases for the byte-level detail. But once Excel has written a literal ? in place of an accent, no tool can bring that character back — the information is no longer in the file. That is the case in CSV shows question marks instead of letters, and the only cure is to re-export from Shopify and handle the encoding correctly the second time. Unsure which case you have? Check the file’s encoding first, or browse the CSVUndo guides index.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my Shopify CSV show Gaussé or weird symbols?
The file is UTF-8, but Excel opened it as Windows-1252 (ANSI). Each accented character is two UTF-8 bytes, and read one byte at a time those bytes appear as Gaussé, € and similar garble — this is called mojibake. The original bytes are intact, so it is fully reversible: read the file back as UTF-8 or run it through a repair tool and the correct characters return.
What encoding does Shopify need for CSV?
UTF-8. Shopify’s product-import and order-export CSVs are all UTF-8, so any file you upload should be UTF-8 too. In Excel that means saving with CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) rather than plain CSV (Comma delimited), which writes Windows-1252 and drops characters outside that range.
How do I open a Shopify CSV export in Excel without breaking accents?
Don’t double-click it — that makes Excel assume ANSI. Open a blank workbook, use Data → From Text/CSV, and set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) before loading. Excel then reads the UTF-8 bytes correctly. Editing the same file in Google Sheets keeps UTF-8 throughout and avoids the problem entirely.
Shopify import turned accents into question marks — can I fix it?
Not from that file. Literal question marks mean Excel already saved the CSV as ANSI and the accented characters were not in the Windows-1252 set, so they were replaced by ? and the original bytes are gone. Unlike mojibake, there is nothing left to reverse — re-export the data from Shopify as UTF-8 and open or save it as UTF-8 this time.
Sources: Shopify merchants document both symptoms in the community forums — accents when exporting orders to CSV and strange characters in product descriptions after a CSV upload. Mojibake is a property of reading UTF-8 bytes through the Windows-1252 code page.