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Why are umlaut characters displayed differently in Excel exports, and how can I fix this?

Umlaut characters may appear incorrectly due to encoding differences when opening CSV files in Excel.

As a premium customer when you try to export the search results, Excel might show letters with umlauts (ä.ü.ö) in the names (companies and persons) as broken. For example: 'Neuhäuser Präzisionswerkzeuge GmbH' might look like 'Neuh‰user Pr‰zisionswerkzeuge GmbH.'

How can you prevent this?

Different Excel language versions may use different character encodings when opening CSV files.

A German-language installation of Excel should correctly display the umlauts of an export from the northdata.de website (but not the northdata.com website, as this is optimized for English).

What always works is to use Excel's File|Import function and then select the ISO_8859_1 character set.

If you use the German version of Excel, on the Mac, the umlauts of both export versions (northdata.com & northdata.de) are displayed correctly if you select "Windows (ANSI)" as the file origin within the import window.