Background
So I've been looking for this to work for some time now. I'm sure there must be a solution as I can't believe that no one in China or Japan have ever tried exporting contacts. What I've found so far is this Microsoft forum discussion that doesn't come to any conclusion, as well as this SuperUser question that doesn't give a satisfactory answer as it only says it works within Outlook.
Issue
So, my issue here is that I have a lot of Outlook contacts that I would like to import into SalesForce. SalesForce can take any CSV file and import it as contacts. When I export my Outlook contacts all the Japanese characters become question marks. If I import this into SalesForce the question marks remain, indicating that it's not that my editor can't show the characters, it's that the characters are really messed up (question marks in Excel, Wordpad, Notepad, Notepad++).
Troubleshooting so far
If I manually change some of the question marks to the proper Japanese characters and import this into Outlook it works – indicating that SalesForce can use Unicode characters. The exported CSV file is saved as ANSI encoding, so the issue is how Outlook encodes the export.
Question
How can I force Outlook to export the contacts as CSV with Unicode encoding? Is this an Outlook issue or is it a system setting where CSV files default back to ANSI? How could I go about changing this?
Best Answer
I was struggling the same issue with Hebrew and finally came out with this solution:
* In (Office) Outlook add you Outlook.com account. Create new one if not exist.
* Copy all your Exchange contacts to Outlook.com contacts.
* Open your Outlook.com in a web browser and open the People app.
* make sure all your copied contacts are there and choose Export all contacts.
* Export to csv file and save it on your hard disc.
* open the saved csv file with notepad and then Save As and make sure it's UTF-8 format.
That's it - now your csv file is using the right international characters.