I get the  symbol at the beginning cell of any csv export. Does anybody know what causes it or how to get rid of it? Thanks Brucehttp://homepages.woosh.co.nz/bf/

What program is exporting the CSV? Have you looked at the file with a binary dump program? Check for export options.__________________________________________________________________ William Vaughn Mentor, Consultant, Trainer, MVP http://betav.com http://betav.com/blog/billva http://www.hitchhikerguides.net Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) Please click the Mark as Answer button if a post solves your problem!

Hi Bruce, Based on my research,  is a Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the UTF-8 Unicode standard, and it appears as the ISO-8859-1 characters  in most text editors. For more information, please refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark However, I also did a test in my environment and didn’t get the  symbol in exporting CSV. So, as William posted, how do you export the report to CSV? Do you use the built-in CSV rendering? If not, please elaborate what you have achieved briefly, and also post which version of Reporting Services you are using. Thanks, Tony Chain Tony Chain [MSFT] MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us Get or Request Code Sample from Microsoft Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

I've just discovered that if I open the csv in notepad I don't get this symbol, if I open it in Excel I do, users will want to open in excel. The csv is generated by using the export button in the Report viewer. Brucehttp://homepages.woosh.co.nz/bf/

Hi Bruce, Since CSV is generated by using the export button in the ReportViewer, you might configure the ReportViewer in remote processing mode which refers to report on the Report Server. Could you please post the Reporting Services version of the Report Server? It can be found at the bottom of the Report Server homepage. And also post which version of Excel version you are using. In addition, if you are using Reporting Services 2008 or Reporting Services 2008 R2, the CSV rendering extension can operate in two modes: one is optimized for Excel and the other is optimized for third-party applications that require strict compliance to the CSV specification in RFC 4180. Since the default mode is optimized for Excel, have you ever modified the device information of the CSV render extension? For more information about CSV Device Information Settings, please refer to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155365.aspx Thanks, Tony ChainTony Chain [MSFT] MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us Get or Request Code Sample from Microsoft Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.