The first row in your spreadsheet must define the column names. Those will be mapped into the fields of your list in myphoner.

If your spreadsheet has a heading or notes on the first row(s), before the column names and the lead data, delete those row(s), so the column names is on the very first row in your spreadsheet.

Here's an example of a well formed spreadsheet (although rather small), ready for import to myphoner:

Most of the time, uploading csv files works all well and dandy, but a number of thing can go wrong, here's some of the most common pitfalls and how to handle them.

I see "encoding could not be determined"

CSV is a plain text format, and plain text is stored using an encoding, that is different depending on the country or region you live in and the language or character set you use. myphoner tries to detect what encoding your file is using, but sometimes it's too hard, and the attempt to show a preview of your data fails.

In this case, you need to tell myphoner what encoding should be used, or try to save your file again using a differnt encoding. We recommend using UTF-8 when saving your files. If you haven't already, give OpenOffice a try. It's a great alternative to Excel - it reads excel files and has better support for both reading and writing csv-files, it's completely free and comes both for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.

I see Error: "Illegal quoting in line xx or Error: Unquoted fields do not allow \r or \n (line xx)"

CSV is a very simple text format, where the columns are separated by commas or semicolons and line breaks delimits the next row. If your data contains commas, semicolons or line breaks (\r or \n) it needs to be wrapped in quotes, so the computer can tell which characters should be treated as data separators, and which ones should be part of the data. If your data also contains quotes, you might end up in trouble.

If this happens, you need to either

Characters look weird. myphoner tries to guess what character encoding (language) you are using, but sometimes it's wrong.

If you see æ instead of æ , this is most likely a mismatched encoding. If this is the case, try saving your csv file in UTF-8 encoding before upload, if possible.

Pro tip: CSV files are plain text files and you can inspect and edit them using a plain text editor such as Sublime Text or Atom.