CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am trying to import a csv file of individual member data to our test installation of civiCRM (4.4.2).
However, whenever I proceed to the mapping stage, the importer is seeing an entire row as a single field.
I have tried changing delimiter (; to ,) and have tried quoting all strings - nothing seems to make a difference. The contacts import didn't have this problem, and I recall there being fields where you could define delimiters on the first screen of that process.

Any ideas?

Richard

Hi Permaculture Geek,

I had the problem you had. For me the problem was MS Excel 2008 on a Mac. It simply wouldn't create a csv in the way that CiviCRM wanted.

I switched to using LibreOffice and the problem was solved.

I prefer Excel to LibreOffice, so I manipulate all data using Excel, save the file in .xlsx format (I dont' want to have multipel csv's that I get confused. Then I open LibreOffice and open the .xlsx file and than save as a .csv. And then no problem with CiviCRM.

Even if your situation is slightly different than mine, I still would give a shot at using a different program to create your csv file.

And as CiviTeacher.com wrote, do make sure the encoding is UTF8.

Shai

The delimiter is set in Administer -> Localization -> Languages, Currency, Locations.  It's counterintuitive, though it helps if you know that the preferred delimiter tends to be a matter of national preference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values#Example