MIF Data Loading with non-English characters in Description without invalid characters or ? question mark in UI

When we receive data from clients to load them into Maximo, they might contain description with non-English characters. Non-English description are characters from languages like French, German, Portuguese etc., 

What we generally do is create a csv file for Enterprise Service with the content from file (.xls or .xlsx) gathered from client in Excel Application. If we load them into Maximo External System, we might end up with question marks or invalid characters in description field. 

Non-English description won't belong to ASCII character set. These characters in description would be removed in csv file if you save csv file by standard file format without encoding.

In order to retain the non-English (non-ASCII) characters in Maximo description field, we need to save the csv file with UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8 bit) encoding.

Steps to follow for saving the file in UTF-8 format:

• Open the .csv file in plain notepad application
• Click on File -> Save As ; On the window that is opened, Choose Encoding = UTF-8