“The first column header has strange characters before it”
When every column maps except the first, and the first looks perfectly normal on screen, the problem is three bytes you cannot see. A byte order mark sits before the first character and belongs to the file rather than to the text, and importers disagree about whether to skip it.
Symptoms
The first column header will not match, though the rest map fine The header appears as Date or "Date" with something before the D The same file imports correctly into one program and not another
What actually causes it
A UTF-8 byte order mark before the first field
Some exporters write three marker bytes at the start of a UTF-8 file. Importers that expect them strip them silently; importers that do not treat them as part of the first column name, so the header no longer equals the word you can see.
A spreadsheet added the mark when saving
Saving as CSV UTF-8 in Excel adds a byte order mark deliberately, because Excel itself needs it to detect the encoding when reopening the file. A file that imported cleanly before being opened stops importing after being saved.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the tool below — it detects a byte order mark and reports it explicitly rather than leaving you to guess at an invisible character.
- Let the tool write a clean copy, and import that instead of re-saving from a spreadsheet.
- If you must save from Excel, choose plain CSV rather than CSV UTF-8 when the file has no accented characters to preserve.
- Where your importer offers an encoding choice, matching it to the file avoids the problem entirely.
Related import problems
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