Trouble exporting data from ODK Briefcase to Excel

Support
1

Hi!

I have a finalized CSV file but I am not able to read it on excel. I use the function "import" and I specify to delimit with comma but I still get something incomprehensible (all the columns are mixed). Is it because the completed forms contain text with comma? What can I use to be able to read the data?

I would be very grateful if someone can help me with that.

Thank you,

Sarah

2

Hi @SarahE http://forum.getodk.org/u/sarahe

What encoding is your CSV file in? UTF-8?

Try different encodings and see if it makes a difference

3

Hi! Thanks for you answer.

I tried all the encodings available on excel and I don't see any difference.
Here is an example of the mixed columns that I have.

Thanks for your help.

Sarah

image

4

My guess is that this is an issue with Excel, so as a quick fix, try LibreOffice or Numbers to see if they import the CSV any better.

If that doesn't work, then it'd help to know what version of Briefcase you are using and to get a copy of the CSV. I understand that your data might be too sensitive to share publicly, but if you can, please attach a CSV with the header row, one working row, and one row that is broken. If you can't share that data, it might be easier to try to recreate a few columns and a few rows so we can try to reproduce this.

5

Yeah! Numbers imports it correctly. I was able to export it to excel.
Thank you very much.