Export in csv

Hi all !

I have installed MySql and HeidiSQL only a few hours ago. Those look like very powerful programs which is far from being the same for me, so I apologize in advance for my questions if they are redundant and plain stupid.

Anyway, let's start. I have created one database with one table with one row. Just to give you an idea of my level, it took me at least one hour to figure out how to enter the arguments for the decimal datatype.

So far I have been able to create my only row with 42 columns. I am trying to build a sports database on French horse racing. My immediate problem is that I would like to use excel to gather information automatically, and in order to do that I need to export/import data between excel and heidi. So I tried to export data from heidi to a csv file, but my data dealing with French races, some have accents (in first names for example) and when opening the exported csv file I get characters like "é" instead of characters like "é".

I searched the web and read some stuff about character setting and collations. I tried the following : "latin1" with collation "latin1_general_cs", "utf8" with "utf8_general_ci", "utf8_bin" and "utf8_unicode_ci", "ascii" with "ascii_bin". None of those choices worked and I still get those weird characters in place of accentuaded correct ones.

I am a bit lost and would really appreciate some help.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers !

try UCS-2. due to some long-ago decision at microsoft, excel will usually export stuff as 16-bit unicode, and will also expect it on import.