Hello All,
Today I'm going to explain the differences between the two CSV formats available in Sage CRM.
When you are: generating reports, exporting find results to file or exporting group list to file you can find two CSV file formats:
- 'CSV',
- 'Excel CSV'.
'CSV' file format is an almost pure CSV file:
- the file is encoded in UTF-8,
- there is no BOM at the beginning of the file,
- fields that contain a special character (comma, newline, or double quote ), are enclosed in double quotes,
- user can choose a field delimiter in preferences.
More information about CSV file format can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values
Example of a CSV file:
First Name,Last Name,Company Name,Phone Full Number
Francis,Pitford,Accounting Inc.,1 312 666 7381
Åukasz,Kowalski,Sage, 1 222 444 555 666
Bill,Jones,Advanced Human,1 606 344 2428
Carol,Newton,Afb Services,1 202 293 9421
Keith,Tarsey,Agrosciences Inc.,1 301 594 8404
'Excel CSV' is a special type of CSV file that loads in Excel without problems:
- the file is encoded in UTF-16,
- there is BOM for UTF-16 encoding so Excel knows how the file is encoded,
- fields that contain a special character (comma, newline, or double quote), are enclosed in double quotes,
- fields are delimited by tabs.
This screenshot shows an example with the BOM and double byte characters contained in an 'Excel CSV' export.
'CSV' file format is better when you want to process the exported file via e.g. command line programs; on the other hand 'Excel CSV' file format is better when you want to load the file in Excel and then process it.
