Fixing garbled Hebrew characters in CSV files in Microsoft Excel
When you open a CSV export in Microsoft Excel and see strange symbols or garbled text – especially if your store uses non-English characters (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, accented European characters, etc.) – this is an encoding issue. It's not a bug in your export; it's how Excel handles the file on your computer.
This article explains why it happens and how to fix it.
Why this happens
Metorik and other software export CSV files in UTF-8 encoding, which supports all languages and special characters. However, Microsoft Excel doesn't always open UTF-8 files correctly by default — it often falls back to your operating system's regional encoding instead, which causes non-ASCII characters to display as gibberish.
How to fix it
Rather than double-clicking the CSV to open it, import it into Excel manually so you can specify the encoding.
Step 1: Open a blank spreadsheet
Open Microsoft Excel and create a new, empty workbook.
Step 2: Go to the Data tab and choose "From Text/CSV"
Click the Data tab in the ribbon, then select Get Data → From Text(Legacy) or Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV depending on your Excel version.
Step 3: Select your downloaded CSV file
Browse to where you saved the Metorik export and select it.
Step 4: Set the encoding to UTF-8
In the import preview dialog, look for the File Origin or Encoding dropdown. Change it to Unicode (UTF-8) or "65001"
Step 5: Follow the prompts to load the data
Depending on your version of Excel, you may need to select the delimiter (tab, comma, etc), then the column formatting. Then click Load, Transform Data, or Finish. Your data should now display correctly with all special characters intact.
Alternative: Use Google Sheets, or Numbers (Mac)
Google Sheets handles UTF-8 encoding automatically. If you're regularly working with non-English characters, importing your CSV into Google Sheets (via File → Import), or using the Numbers app for Mac, may be the easiest long-term solution.
Still seeing issues?
If characters are still garbled after following these steps, contact Metorik support and include:
- A screenshot of what you're seeing
- The language/region settings on your computer
- Which version of Excel you're using (e.g. Excel 365, Excel 2019)