Attribute data in alphanumeric type often cause encoding problems, related to the way the characters of a language, such as French accents and cedillas, are translated in the file.

An encoding problem may occur when transferring a file from one application to another. The sign is that some characters have been replaced with cabalistic signs. We must then attempt to export the first application file in an encoding that can be read by the second. This can be done in spreadsheets by choosing the parameters for import and export, or by using utilities specialized in the management of data formats.

For French, the two classic encodings are UTF8 and ISO-8859-1.
[French: Encodage]