Exporting Outlook contacts to Unicode CSV

Question

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?

Solution

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.

Comments

[Raystafarian]

I'm pretty sure outlook file is ascii

[Tanaka Saito]

When opening it in Notepad it looks ilke it is ANSI but it seems that you are correct here. Regardless of it being ANSI or ASCII by default, I would really like to change it to Unicode.

[Raystafarian]

I meant that not in that you were incorrect, but in I don't think it's possible to change the encoding through outlook.

[Tanaka Saito]

No worries, I was incorrect :) It looks like you are correct in that it cannot be changed. What I did find was the following article explaining how to change the account to a Unicode account: support.office.com/en-us/article/… However, I checked with our IT manager and he showed me that it actually is set to Unicode so something else must be at play here, maybe some local setting on my computer.

[Máté Juhász]

OP asks about exporting contacts and IMPORTING THEM TO SALESFORCE. Your solutions stops with contacts in the phone, how you can export them to Salesforce?

[omarmallat]

his problem is not in importing, but in exporting from outlook with Unicode support. my solution is to allow him, using a Mobile phone, to transfer his contact to google with Unicode. once contacts are in google, he can make export with Unicode, and then import it anywhere.

[omarmallat]

even in his description to his issue, he summarize his question by asking how to export with Unicode, and not how to import, because he explained how he imported to SalesForce a bad file. I did not see how you find that I'm not answering his question.