Skip to content
This page is also available in your language. Switch

Sync settings

Choose what your account keeps in step on every device where you are signed in.

  • My tools

    Always synced: the tools on your board, their order and size.

  • The windows open on your start page, including what you typed in them.

  • Every note in the notepad – on the notepad page, on your board and in windows.

  • Every list of website shortcuts – on the shortcuts page, on your board and in windows.

  • Every grid in the cover grid maker – on its page, on your board and in windows.

  • Every list of bookmarked organisations in the OIN lookup – on its page, on your board and in windows.

  • Keeps your pipeline and saved recipes on all your devices. Your files are never synced – only the steps and settings.

Turning something off removes it from your account straight away. Your devices keep their own copy.

Notifications

Tools that can tell you about something new while a Synsi tab is open, even when you are in another tab or app. Choose them for this browser.

This browser cannot show notifications from websites.
Notifications are blocked for this site. Allow them in your browser’s site settings (the icon left of the address), then switch them on here.

  • Says “New message” while a Synsi tab is open – never who wrote it or what.

Your choice is stored in this browser only. Notifications never show personal content such as a message or a number. They work while a Synsi tab is open; closed tabs get none.

Browse all tools →

Convert a CSV file’s encoding and fix garbled characters

Choose how the file is really encoded, see the characters come out right, and save it in the encoding you need.

My tools →
Open full app
Open full app
Runs in your browser – your data stays on your device unless you turn on syncing

How to use the Convert CSV Encoding

  1. 1 Drop the CSV file on the studio, or try the example (a Windows-1252 file).
  2. 2 Under Source, open “Character encoding”. Try the encodings until names like Joël and Zoë read correctly.
  3. 3 If text is already garbled in the file itself, add the step “Repair garbled characters”.
  4. 4 Under Export options choose the output encoding, for example UTF-8, and download.

Characters are bytes plus a guess

A text file is a series of bytes. Which letter a byte stands for depends on the encoding, and the file does not say which one was used. Open a Windows-1252 file as UTF-8 and “é” turns into a replacement character; open UTF-8 as Windows-1252 and it becomes “é”. The studio detects UTF-8 (including the byte-order mark and UTF-16) reliably, because invalid UTF-8 is easy to spot, and otherwise falls back to Windows-1252, the usual Western European encoding. It tells you when that is a guess.

Choosing and converting

Under Source you can pick UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 (with the euro sign), Windows-1250, Windows-1251 or Mac Roman. The preview updates immediately. On export the same list, minus the rarest, is available. Characters that the target encoding cannot hold – a euro sign in ISO-8859-1, or any Chinese character in Windows-1252 – are written as “?” and counted in a warning, so you know before you download. UTF-8 holds everything and is what the WHATWG Encoding Standard recommends for new files.

Text that was already damaged

If a program already read the file with the wrong encoding and saved it again, the garbled characters are now real text. “Repair garbled characters” reverses the typical case, UTF-8 read as Windows-1252, including text damaged twice. It leaves text alone that has no sign of damage.

Limits

Automatic detection cannot tell the single-byte encodings apart (Windows-1250 from Windows-1252, for instance); choose the right one by eye. Chinese, Japanese and Korean legacy encodings are not supported.

Frequently asked questions

Which encoding should I export?

UTF-8 unless the receiving program insists otherwise. Excel on Windows reads UTF-8 correctly when the file starts with a byte-order mark; use “UTF-8 with byte-order mark” for that.

What does a “?” in the output mean?

The chosen encoding has no character for it. The warning shows how many. Export as UTF-8 to keep them.

The file looks right in the preview but wrong in my program – why?

Your program is guessing the encoding. Save as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which most Windows programs recognise.

Last updated: