XLSX to CSV UTF-8 that keeps every accent and script

Most garbled CSV files are not damaged at all. They are written in one character encoding and read in another, so José turns into José and a Greek product name becomes a row of question marks. UTF-8 is the encoding every database, scripting language and cloud import expects, and it covers every alphabet in a single file.

This converter starts with UTF-8 already selected, so you only decide whether the file needs a byte order mark. For the general options of the same conversion see XLSX to CSV, and if your importer wants semicolons instead of commas, look at XLS to CSV with semicolons.

How to convert XLSX to CSV UTF-8 in three steps

1. 1Upload the .xlsx file that contains accented or non Latin text.
2. 2Keep UTF-8, or switch to UTF-8 with BOM for Excel users, and choose the sheet.
3. 3Convert and download the CSV, then import it without encoding errors.

When a byte order mark helps and when it breaks an import

A byte order mark is three invisible bytes (EF BB BF) at the very start of the file. Excel on Windows looks for them before deciding how to decode a CSV. Without them it falls back to the local code page, which is why a perfectly valid UTF-8 file shows mojibake when a colleague opens it. If the CSV is meant for people who live in Excel, choose UTF-8 with BOM.

The same three bytes cause trouble for machines. A script that reads the header row may see the first column as \ufeffemail instead of email, and a strict importer then reports a missing required column. Some older PHP and shell tools also print the marker as visible junk. For anything that goes into code, an API or a database, choose plain UTF-8 and let the reader assume Unicode.

XLSX itself stores text as Unicode, so the source is never the problem. Characters only disappear when an export squeezes them into a narrow code page such as Windows-1252, which has no room for Polish, Czech, Cyrillic, Chinese or emoji. If you need typed values rather than text, Excel to JSON writes UTF-8 by definition, and CSV to XLSX turns a UTF-8 CSV back into a workbook without guesswork.