Steven Zahm@ Reinhard
RE: What can I do to avoid this?
Don’t open it in Excel… Use Google Sheets or LibreOffice since they properly open UTF8 encoded files (required to properly support extended characters which exist in German and other languages). One open in them, you can save out as an Excel file.
There is a non obvious option to default to UTF8 when opening a CSV file in Excel … I can only recall it had to do something with an import option. I tried searching for the link I found before but came up short.
A workaround is to open a new blank workbook in Excel, click the Data tab, click the Import from CSV button in the ribbon. In the popup choose you file. After you choose your file, the popup will display an option for the “File Origin”. Choose the 65001: Unicode (UTF8) option.
The downside with this workaround is that line breaks in the bio/notes fields will be read as new rows by Excel, breaking the those entries.
Hope this helps!
ps. I just made a very slight tweak to the export code which will be included in the next version that might “help” excel properly open the CSV file with the UTF8 encoding. This tweak will be in the updated planned for the end of the week.