Excel


If there are UTF-8 (non-latin) characters, then Open Office should be used instead of Excel.



Opening the file in this way is important when opening Location exports that will be edited and reimported as Updates because it prevents Excel from reformatting certain values like zip codes and phone numbers in a way that could corrupt your location data.

  1. Save the .sass file to your computer
    • Please note for Mac users, you must first change the .sass file into the .txt format, by right-clicking the file and clicking rename.
  2. Go to Excel
  3. Choose File -> Open -> Browse  (you may need to select the option here to view All Files, not just Excel files.)
  4. Select the saved .sass file
  5. Click Open
  6. This will begin the File import wizard:
    1. At Step 1 leave the selection at Delimited and click Next, then 
    2. At Step 2, select tab for the delimiter and click Next.
    3. At Step 3 of the import wizard, it is essential to select all columns in the preview window (shift+click last column), and then click "Text" for the format. This prevents Excel from trying to reformat values and dropping leading 0s or turning phone numbers into large decimal numbers, etc.
    4. Click Finish
    5. If Excel gives a pop up here with Convert or Don't Convert options, choose Don't Convert.



OpenOffice

Here are the steps for opening a tab-delimited text file with special characters using OpenOffice. 

  1. Save the exported .sass file to your computer. 
  2.  Without opening the file, change the extension to the .csv extension. This makes opening it with OpenOffice easier. 
  3. Open OpenOffice and go to File -> Open
  4. Select the saved file and click Open
  5. Under Character set, choose Unicode (UTF-8) 
  6. Under separator options, select tab
  7. Highlight all columns in the preview and select Text for Column Type 
  8. Here is a screenshot of how the settings should look on that page:

8. Click OK.

        This will handle all the special characters the right way. You can then make any changes to the locations that you would like.



Once all your changes are made, you will need to save the OpenOffice file the following way:

  1. Go to File -> Save As
  2. Make sure your file has a name, select Text CSV as the file type
  3. Check the box titled "Edit Filter Settings", then click Save, which will bring up another dialogue box
    • If it asks you if you want to keep the current formatting, click yes.
  4. The "Export Text File" box then appears, set the options as follows:
    • Character set: Unicode (UTF-8)
    • Field Delimiter: {Tab}
    • Text Delimiter: Leave this blank. You can click the field and hit backspace to remove the ". 
    • Here is how the settings on this box should appear: 


8. Click OK.


You now have a text file with the correct handling of the special characters that you can import back into Sassie as a location update.