Why are the Quotation marks in Microsoft Word different from the one in .csv?

Yi Yan.L.782
Yi Yan.L.782 Posts: 16 Analytics Builder Transition
in Higher Ed / Postsecondary

Hi Brightspace,

Here's the context:

Our lecturers have a set of quiz questions that they had written out in a word document file before using the given BS Quiz Template to import the quiz questions into Brightspace.

Some of these questions include quotation marks and we realised that when the quotation marks were copied from the word doc file, there's a difference in the quotation marks “” copied from word (orange cell) as compared to the quotation marks "" written out in excel (see the green cell).

Quotation marks.png

The quotation marks “” (in the orange cell) would show up in Brightspace as these icons �, which is incorrect.

To get around this, the only way I've thought of so far is to simply and painstakingly identify the quotation marks and manually retype each quotation mark in excel. Excel is not able to find and replace the “” quotation marks, and copying and pasting as plain text does not convert the quotation marks as well.

Thus, this brings about my question - Why are the Quotation marks in Microsoft Word different from the one in .csv?

And is there any advice for me to ensure that the quotation marks copied into excel gets read properly in Brightspace?

Thank you!

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Best Answers

  • Owen.M.3197
    Owen.M.3197 Posts: 70 admin
    Answer ✓

    Hi there!

    Thanks for bringing this great question to the Brightspace Community. My name is Owen and I'm happy to assist with this quotation mark issue.

    This has to do with the fact that Microsoft Word uses smart quotes (those rounded ones) which indicate the quotation mark's position in a sentence, whereas .csv files automatically convert to straight and positionally-neutral quotation marks.

    Here is an article on how to turn off smart quotes in Word to circumvent this issue!

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/smart-quotes-in-word-and-powerpoint-702fc92e-b723-4e3d-b2cc-71dedaf2f343

    To ensure the quotes are read in correctly, they should be in the straight form, as automatically present in .csv files.

    Cheers!

    Owen

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  • Jonathan.H.434
    Jonathan.H.434 Posts: 12 Analytics Builder Transition
    Answer ✓

    I'll try to answer your question in 2 parts.

    First "Why are the Quotation marks in Microsoft Word different from the one in .csv?"

    This has to do with the fact that standard keyboard layouts only have 1 "quotation mark" key. When you type a quotation mark, it show up as a "straight quote", however that doesn't look as nice in print as traditional "curly quotes". At some point Word starting using "SmartQuotes" where straight quotes were auto-replaced with curly quotes, based on the position when typed. Since Word is for "print", and Excel is for data that's why the quotes are different. Every variation of single/double quote as straight or right/left is technically a separate character.

    Second "And is there any advice for me to ensure that the quotation marks copied into excel gets read properly in Brightspace?"

    If you're running into issues with smartquotes not being set as straight quotes (this also can apply to apostrophes), I recommend that you open the .CSV file in a text editor like Notepad++ and do a find/replace. You can copy a curly quote character, paste it into the "Find" field, and simply type a straight quote in the replace field. You'll need do it once for right curly quotes, and once for left curly quote, and (possibly) once for apostrophes. It only takes a few seconds each, so much better than trying to do it one-by-one.

    I'm sure there's probably a way to build an Excel macro to do this, but using a text editor is really straight-forward.

    Hope that helps!

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