Mac Excel – Won’t Recognize Spanish/Portuguese Accents

encodinginternationalizationms office

I'm working with Excel to open a delimited (tabbed) txt file that contains Portuguese and Spanish accents. As you can see below, in the third row there is a title "Último Año" that is correct.

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However when I import the file into Excel the text is misinterpreted as "Último Año".

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The correct codepage would be Unicode UTF-8 or ANSI. I tried several options, like using the import file options from Excel to select UTF-8 (and other formats) but the result is always weird.

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Does anybody know how to interpret/display the correct latin accents on Mac Excel?

Best Answer

After several bumps in the wall I figure out this Terminal command (Shell Script) that will convert properly the files from UTF-8 for Latin 1:

iconv -f UTF-8 -t LATIN1 </path/sourceFile.txt >/path/destinationFile.txt

Oddly enough, the Finder preview won't display the correct characters and TextEdit won't even open the file. But Excel recognize everything, which is fine for me.

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