Einstein Analytics: Upload Excel File with Special Characters

Use case: you received an Excel file that contains characters not in English that need to be loaded as a dataset in Einstein Analytics, here an example:

But since Einstein Analytics only take CSV file, you need to save the Excel file into CSV file. When you open the CSV file with a text editor, the multibyte characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean become "?", while extended ASCII characters such as ö are maintenance.

When we upload a CSV file to Einstein Analytics, by default, the File Encoding is UTF-8.

This will cause that special characters from extended ASCII not encode properly.

By changing the File Encoding to US-ASCII, this will solve the issue of characters in extended ASCII, but not for multibyte characters. So, if your data source does not have multibyte characters, this approach will work.

CSV UTF-8

If you are aware of when do Save As in Excel, there is an option to save as type "CSV UTF-8" (instead of just CSV). Here is the result when open the CSV file from the same Excel file with a text editor

Now, let us upload this CSV file to Einstein Analytics and keep the file encoding to UTF-8.