Fix Garbled Characters in a CSV File

What the error actually means

Text such as José, ’, or � usually means the bytes were decoded with the wrong character encoding. This is not a font problem, and changing the spreadsheet font will not restore the original characters.

Likely causes

• UTF-8 text was opened as Windows-1252 or Latin-1.
• A legacy Windows export was treated as UTF-8.
• The file lacks a byte-order mark and the application guessed incorrectly.
• The text was decoded and re-encoded more than once.

A safe repair workflow

1. 1Keep the original bytes; repeated saves can make recovery harder.
2. 2Open the file in the encoding fixer and preview likely source encodings.
3. 3Choose the preview in which names, symbols, and punctuation are readable.
4. 4Export as UTF-8 and reopen that copy in the destination application.

How to verify the result

A file that downloads successfully is not automatically a correct file. Check the result at both the structural and business-data levels:

• Accented names and non-Latin scripts display correctly.
• Currency symbols and curly punctuation are intact.
• No replacement characters remain.
• The destination import produces the same visible text as the preview.