Encrypted Kobo form with gibberish text response

User Support Form Building
1

Good afternoon,

I’m working with an encrypted XLS form in KoboCollect, and use ODK Briefcase for decrpytion. For MPC questions all data decrypts perfectly. The only problem is with the text responses, as Arabic text is still gibberish after decryption:
Knipsel

Does anyone know how I can solve this problem?

Thanks in advance!

2

Ah, problem solved. It had nothing to do with decryption but non-latin characters instead. This is the solution:

“When using Excel, you cannot just double-click and open a CSV file
containing non-latin (e.g., Arabic) characters. You must open Excel
manually, then import the data, choosing “Unicode (UTF-8)” from the “File
Origin” drop-down.”

1 Like
3

Hi @meeske,

Thank you for sharing your way-out to the entire community! This should help a lot of users facing similar problems.

Have a great day!

1 Like
4

Apologies for commenting on an old post, but I was wondering if you are also plagued by line breaks in Arabic texts when importing the data. I’ve been fixing these line breaks manually, but I would very much like to find a way to automate this process, as it’s quite time consuming.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!