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Data merge is not importing certain characters correctly. Namely greek letters (Ψ, Ω, etc). I've tried different fonts and still no dice.

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Found the solution here. The trick was changing the encoding on the .csv to UTF-16

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  • Great, it works with changing the encoding to UTF-16 with Sublime text editor by File > Save with encoding. After that I selected ASCI as import in Indesign, or is as UNICODE better?
    – Jeroen Steen
    Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 13:45
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I was able to successfully load Japanese characters by:

  1. save the data file as .csv in excel
  2. take that excel doc and uploading it to google sheets (to remove all the junk excel puts in their .csv)
  3. Redownload the file from google sheets. locate the file and (on windows) right click the file and hit "edit".
  4. This opened the file in Notepad, hit "save as" and change the encoding to "Unicode"
  5. load the new text file in Data Merge

I hope this helps anyone who may be googling around looking for a solution!

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  • Excel doesn’t put any ‘junk’ in CSV files. It offers very little choice (read: none at all) by way of encoding and delimiter character, and it tends to quote columns that don’t need quoting, but none of that is ‘junk’. Uploading to Google Sheets is completely unnecessary, just open the file in a proper editor – don’t use Notepad, use something like Notepad++ or VSCode which give you actual control over the output and support CSV as a format, rather than just as plain text – and save with the appropriate settings.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 6:50
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If you save the Excel file as a Unicode file, you get what is essentially a tab delimited file. Take the file into Notepad or your favourite text editor and do a search and replace for the tabs and any extra spaces to each side and replace them with commas. You might need to do this two or three times to get the commas everywhere they need to go. Then save as "All Files ." and change the extension to CSV. Bada bing! The full Unicode set of characters will be preserved.

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  • Whether it's tabs, commas or semicolons is irrelevant. All three types of delimiters are accepted. You don't need to save it as a .CSV either, a .TXT will do. It's an encoding problem, not a delimiting or extension problem.
    – Vun-Hugh Vaw
    Commented Jul 3 at 15:26
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I had the same issue. UTF-8 encoding gave garbled text when there were non-ascii characters, and indd couldn't handle UTF-16.

I opened the CSV in VSCode, and resaved it with Western (Windows 1252) encoding.

It's not perfect: Hagåtña comes in OK, but Kandahār fails.

I'm using InDesign 17.0.1 x64.

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  • InDesign can handle UTF-16. UTF-8 doesn't cause any problem for the CSV file alone, but InDesign can't interpret it and that's where the garbling happens. Make sure to use UTF-16.
    – Vun-Hugh Vaw
    Commented Jul 3 at 15:24
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After hours of struggling, I've finally found a solution.

  1. DO NOT export with Excel. It doesn't offer encoding options, and it will garble your non-ASCII text. It really sucks. Use it only as a convenient tabular editor.
  2. Get Notepad++.
  3. InDesign accepts any .TXT or .CSV file. So just create a new file in Notepad++ and copy your entire spreadsheet to it. Select all, copy, paste, simple as that.
  4. IMPORTANT: Find "Encoding" on Notepad++'s menu bar. Choose either "UTF-16 BE BOM" or "UTF-16 LE BOM". "UTF-8" is what causes problems for most people, so make sure it's not chosen.
  5. Save your file as a simple .TXT file. Don't bother wasting your time with .CSV.
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  • The format of the file (.txt, .csv, etc) is not relevant. Only the encoding matters.
    – iicaptain
    Commented Aug 4 at 16:46

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