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Troubleshoot List Import Errors
Troubleshoot List Import Errors

If you are receiving an error when uploading a list, this article may help.

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Written by Aleksi Vassiliev
Updated over a week ago

The Lists tool is a great feature of Dealfront, and it's quite simple to get started. If you're encountering issues, they typically fall into a couple of categories: uploading issues, or issues with data matching.

Upload Issues:

Importing a list is simple, but if an error does occur it is typically this one:

"List processing failed. Please make sure that the file uses UTF-8 encoding and try again."

UTF-8 is the primary character encoding for the World Wide Web. UTF-8 can support many languages and many different combinations of pages and forms. It also fast tracks things so that servers don't need to individually determine the encoding of every file. The short answer is that UTF-8 encoding makes things faster and simpler.

You can typically save CSV files with UTF-8 encoding if it isn't done automatically by the software you are using.

Prepare your list using Notepad

  1. Click on File

  2. Choose Save As

  3. There are three items to update in the Save dialog that comes up:
    - Save as type: change this to 'All Files'
    - File name: name your file and add the .csv extension to it - e.g.: myupdates.csv
    - Encoding: click on the dropdown and choose UTF-8

  4. Save!

The file should now be in UTF-8 encoding, and it should successfully upload.

Prepare your list using Google

  1. Open Google Drive

  2. Create a new Google Sheets document

  3. In the new Google Sheets document, import your original CSV file

  4. Once you import your file, you can click on File > Download > Comma-Separated Values (.csv) to save the file to your computer.

The file should now be in UTF-8 encoding, and it should successfully upload.

Prepare your list using Numbers

  1. Click on File

  2. Hover over Export 

  3. In the submenu that appears, choose CSV

  4. Click on Advanced Options to show the Text Encoding dropdown

  5. Select Unicode (UTF-8) from the dropdown menu

  6. Click Next

  7. Save!

The file should now be in UTF-8 encoding, and it should successfully upload.

Prepare your list using Excel

When exporting to .csv with Excel, this can create unreadable characters in the files. You can work around this by re-saving the file from Notepad with the following instructions if you are experiencing issues.
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​Please note: Older versions of Excel for Mac do not natively support the import or export of UTF-8 encoded files and the encoding must be selected. Opening and saving the file from Numbers may be a better option in this case.

If you use the Windows operating system and you have Notepad

  1. Open the .xlsx file in MS Excel, then click File > Save As (Other Formats).

  2. Enter any name for the file, then select "Unicode Text (.txt)" for "Save as type"

  3. Click Save

  4. Open the Unicode text file using Microsoft Notepad. Some characters appear as a box. This is because Notepad cannot display some Unicode characters. You can ignore these characters for now

  5. Replace tabs with commas (",”) so that the .xlsx file is tab-delimited and in proper comma-separated value (CSV) format

  6. Select a tab character by dragging the character between two column headers and pressing CTRL+C

  7. Use the Replace function (CTRL+H) to replace all tab characters with commas.

  8. In Notepad, click Save As

  9. Enter a filename and change Encoding to "UTF-8"

  10. Add .csv at the end of the file name to change the file extension from ".txt" to ".csv"

  11. Click Save. The file icon should be changed to MS Excel now

  12. Open the CSV file from Excel and verify the data.(Even if you find a problem, do not save the file in Excel. It will cause the encoding problem again. Just check the data only in Excel. If you see a data problem at this stage, fix the data from the original spreadsheet and repeat the steps again. You can also change the file from Notepad but make sure to ensure to save the file as UTF-8 format.)

You can now use this CSV file for importing.

If you use another program, you might be able to manually change the encoding it uses when saving a file. Be sure to look through their documentation to find out more about how this works.

You can also use https://csvlint.io/about to look at your CSV and see if there are formatting or other issues.

Matching Issues:

Depending upon how you have your lists and names formatted, matching issues can sometimes arise. To get the best match we recommend some key practices and things to know:

  1. Create a 2-column only list of company names and their website addresses in the following format:
    company, company.com
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  2. Save as a CSV. Note that character case will be ignored during processing and eliminating any prefix such as 'www.' is ideal
    ​

  3. Do not leave empty rows between the companies and website addresses in the CSV. The minimum length of the company name is 2 characters. Save the file in the UTF-8 encoding format
    ​

  4. Only the first 10,000 entries of a list will be loaded. If the list exceeds 10,000 entries you can split longer lists and upload them individually. You can upload up to 20 lists. It might take some time to upload your list if it's larger in size.
    ​

  5. We use multiple sources to determine global organization names so, in general, it would be almost impossible to ensure that every version of a company name exactly matches our company database. To help give room for matching for each company name, please leave the smallest subset of "meaningful parts". For example, stating "3i Group Limited" as "3i", "Microsoft Corporation" to "Microsoft", or  "Adobe Inc." to "Adobe" etc.
    ​

List Size Mismatch

The list of companies in Dealfront could be smaller in quantity than the number of companies that were on your CSV import list for two reasons:

  1. Duplicates of company names or domain names

    If some of the companies on your CSV list share the same domain name or company name, the number of the companies showing in the Dealfront list will equal the number of unique domain names/company names.

  2. Companies not yet in our database
    If we do not have a company on your CSV list in our database, or the name/domain is not exact, those won't be matched and shown on the List. The matching of companies is done by domains or names (without suffixes like inc.) in a case-insensitive way and looks for exact matches. Each company cannot be matched more than once. If the company's name is different to what we have in our database, it will not be matched.

Hopefully, these tips and checks make it easy for you to get everything you want out of upload a List, however, if you do have problems, please let us know by contacting our support team via the chat bubble in the lower right corner of the app, or by email to support@dealfront.com.

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Questions, comments, feedback? Please let us know by contacting our support team via the chat or by sending us an email at support@dealfront.com.

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