Encoding outlook 2021 contacts

Question

I run Outlook 2021 under Windows 11 and want to import contacts from Outlook on the webb. These contacts have international characters (Swedish ä, å, ö) and they are corectly encoded in the webb app. I have exported them to a csv file and then imported them file into Outlook 2021. Now the international characters are wrongly encoded with non alphabetic characters. How do I solve this problem without having to edit all my contacts (800+) manually?

John (******@gmail.com

Answer 1

Hi @John McWilliam ，

I understand that you’re still facing issues with the encoding of international characters in Outlook 2021. You can try changing the default outgoing encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) to ensure that the characters are displayed correctly. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Open Outlook 2021 and select File from the top menu.
2. Click on Options and select Advanced from the left-hand side options.
3. Under International Options, ensure that the encoding of outgoing messages is set to Automatically Select Unicode (UTF-8).
4. Click OK to save the changes.

If this does not work, you can try changing the character encoding of the CSV file before importing it into Outlook 2021. Here’s how you can do it:

1. In Excel, create a new blank document (workbook).
2. From the Data menu, select From Text/CSV. Browse to your exported CSV file (you may have to select to display Text Files (....csv) to see it). Select Import.
3. In the dialog box that appears, under File Origin, choose the encoding that makes the characters in the text appear correctly, for example, Cyrillic Windows 1251, and then select Load.
4. Check that characters are displayed correctly in Excel.
5. Select File >Save As. Enter a name for your file, and select CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv) as your file type.
6. Select Save.

Hope above can help you.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment". 

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.