SnTT: Notes Document Structured Text Export for Multilingual (UTF-8)

This Lotus Notes Domino “Show and Tell Thursday” was promoted by Paul Harrison’s new blog and his sntt post on SnTT: Notes Document Structured Text Export. (Welcome Paul, and thank you!) My current nightmare involves a lot of Multilingual madness. Within Notes/Domino is not a big deal (it’s all auto-magical) , but getting it in and out can be tough.

So a couple of observations to Paul’s posting (if only to remind my future self) :

• Under (for R7) “File”, “Preferences”, User Preferences” , there is a Tab for “International” and a setting for “”Import/Export characters.” I’m using “Unicode (UTF-8)”.
• Microsoft Excel (2000) CSV imports and “Save as..” does not handle UTF-8, although there is a “Save as..” “Unicode Text”. (there maybe a option to respect UTF-8 in there, and it maybe handled by Excel 2003 or Excel 2007, but that’s what I have!)
• Open Office’s (2.3) Calc asks me what Character set to Import the csv file with. Calc also asks me the character set to use in the creation of CSV files.

It’s also worth highlighting Kevin Pettitt’s recent post : Free Tools for Importing Excel Data Into Notes and the (new to me, and free) tool from AGE Computer Consultancy. Very nicely done.

The code in my previously written Export any Lotus Notes View to CSV or Excel, automagically post can easily be modified to (in particular the “Open” statement for the CSV export) to allow for a “UTF-8” character set.

Update :  For importing text into Notes, what I’ve found works best for me is: “save as” CVS from Open Office Calc, and make sure your saving as UTF-8, no double quotes (“) for the text delimiter, and a ~ rather than a coma (,) for field delimiter (because the text can content coma’s); create a .COL file; Import in the Notes Client as Tabular Text (rename the .csv file to a .txt file).