[dugost]

Hi. I have some spreadsheet data as comma-separated values text files (.csv), and some .xls files as well, but when I open them in NeoOffice or a spreadsheet application all accented characters are being displayed as black diamonds with question marks in them. In TextWrangler, they appear as screwy letter combinations, no diamonds in that case. Someone viewing the same file in Windows though sees the proper characters.

I don't understand character encoding very well at all. Can someone explain to me how I can open or convert these files to use the proper encoding? I'm opening them in NeoOffice as UTF-8 but the Mac's native encoding of Latin-1 or whatever is messing things up.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Thinine]

Open them as a plain text file in TextEdit (or another editor) do a Save As... (or Duplicate) and the save dialog should ask you what encoding you want to use.

[dugost]

Thanks. Opening in TextEdit with the plain text encoding set to Western (Windows Latin 1) the using the same encoding with TextWrangler's Open > Read As option did the trick!