Sometimes, your CSV file might contain characters that our Glossary doesn't support. If this happens, after you click the button to import terms, you'll see an error message displayed near the top of the page, noting that we were unable to import the glossary terms due to non UTF-8 characters in the spreadsheet. We'll provide a list of the rows from the CSV that contained these characters.
Here's what the error message looks like:
Sample error message for failed glossary term import
Resolving this message can get a little tricky. If you open the CSV in Excel or another spreadsheet program, they will often hide or display nothing for non UTF-8 characters.
So here's what we recommend for trying to resolve your errors:
- Find wherever you have the CSV File stored on your computer.
- Right-click and select Open With.
- Choose a text editor, such as Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, or any other basic text editor you have installed on your computer to open the CSV.
- Find the rows in the CSV that correspond to the rows in the warning message displayed in KnowledgeOwl.
- Text editors generally either display the characters outright OR they'll display an icon when they're unable to display a character (such as �). Look for an icon like that, an unusual character, or any kind of weird code/characters.
- Once you find what you think is the offending character(s), delete them from the CSV in the text editor.
- Once you've edited all of the rows that threw errors, Save your CSV file.
- You can now try re-importing this same CSV file. Hopefully those changes did the trick!
If you're continuing to get glossary import errors and you can't figure out why, please contact us and include a copy of the CSV file. Our support owls should be able to help get things sorted out.