How can I fix the UTF-8 error when bulk uploading users?

Question

When I tried to bulk upload users, I received the error message below:

For some reason, the data to import was not ready in our servers. Try again. We've been notified about this and will solve the problem if there's a bug. If the error persists, please contact our customer service team. The error was: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8.

How can I fix the UTF-8 error when bulk uploading users?

Answer

This error is created when the uploaded file isn't in a UTF-8 format. UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding format on the Internet.

This error occurs because the software you use encodes the file in a different format, such as ISO-8859, instead of UTF-8. There are different solutions you can use to change your file to UTF-8 encoding:

Gmail or Google Drive

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel without UTF-8 CSV

If you have a Gmail account or used Google Drive previously

1. Open Google Drive.
2. Create a new Google Sheets document.
3. Import your CSV file.
4. Click File > Download As > Comma-Separated Values to save the file to your computer.

The file downloads in UTF-8 encoding, and it will successfully upload.

If you used Microsoft Excel

1. Open your CSV file in Microsoft Excel, then select File > Save As.
2. Enter a name for the file, and select CSV UTF-8 (comma separate) (*.csv) as your desired file format.
3. Select Save.

If you use Microsoft Excel on Windows but don't have the ability to save as UTF-8 CSV and you have Notepad

1. Open the .xlsx file in Microsoft Excel, then click File > Save As (Other Formats).
2. Enter any name for the file, then select Unicode Text (.txt) for Save as type.
3. Select Save.
4. Open the Unicode text file using Microsoft Notepad.
   Some characters appear as a box because Notepad can't display some Unicode characters. Ignore these characters for now.
5. Replace tabs (→) with commas (,) so that the .xlsx file is comma separated and in proper comma-separated value (CSV) format.
6. Select a tab character by dragging the character between two column headers and pressing CTRL+C.
7. Use the Replace function to replace all tab characters with commas.
8. In Notepad, select Save As.
9. Enter a filename and change Encoding to UTF-8.
10. Add .csv at the end of the file name to change the file extension from .txt to .csv.
11. Select Save.
    The file icon should be changed to Microsoft Excel.
12. Open the CSV file from Excel and verify the data.
    If you find a problem, don't save the file in Excel. It will cause the encoding problem again. Instead, check the data only in Excel. If you see a data problem at this stage, fix the data from the original spreadsheet and repeat the steps. You can also change the file from Notepad but make sure to save the file in UTF-8 format.

You can now use this CSV file for importing.