How to Remove Accents From Names in a CSV (é, ñ, ü to Plain Letters)

To remove accents from names in a CSV, replace each accented letter with its plain version in the columns that hold names. The remove accents from CSV tool does it in your browser: upload a CSV or .xlsx file, check the ticked columns, read the examples and download the result. Columns with accented letters are ticked for you, and the email column is left out.

Nothing is uploaded; the file is read on your device.

Why you might want to

Some mail merge tools, older CRMs and printing systems show accented letters as question marks or boxes. Names written with and without accents, such as Jose and José, also fail to match when you remove duplicates or compare two lists. Plain spellings make those comparisons work. Keep the original file too, because a person named José may prefer the accent in a greeting.

If the accents already look wrong, with sequences like é in place of é, the problem is encoding, not accents. See fixing garbled characters in a CSV first.

Doing it by hand

Excel and Google Sheets have no function that strips accents. The manual route is a nested SUBSTITUTE for each letter you expect:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"é","e"),"ñ","n"),"ü","u")

That works for a handful of letters and gets long fast, because you need a pair for every accented letter, capitals included. Find and Replace across a column does the same one letter at a time. A tool is quicker once the list has more than a few kinds of accent.

Step 1: load the file

Upload the CSV or .xlsx, or paste the cells with the header row first.

Step 2: check the columns

The tool ticks the columns that hold accented letters. Untick any that should stay as written, such as a column of addresses in another language.

Step 3: read the examples and download

A few before and after pairs are shown, with the count of changed cells. Catch anything you did not want changed, then download.

How letters are replaced

Letters made of a base letter plus a mark, such as é, ñ, ç, å and ü, lose the mark. Letters that are not a base plus a mark use their usual plain spelling: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, œ becomes oe, ø becomes o, ł becomes l and đ becomes d. German names are sometimes written with ue for ü; this tool writes u. Letters from other writing systems are left alone.

What about the email column

Addresses can contain accented letters before the @ sign, and removing them can point the address at a different mailbox. So the column is not ticked by default. For addresses use the email typo corrector, and for hidden characters the invisible character remover.

What this tool cannot do

• It changes spelling, so keep the original file when exact names matter.
• German ü is written u, not ue.
• Non-Latin alphabets are not transliterated.
• Only the first sheet of a workbook is read.

For tidying names before a send, see cold email personalization at scale.

Check the addresses on the list

Names fixed, addresses still unchecked. Upload your list on the verify page: the first 100 email checks are free with a Google sign-in, no card. Each address comes back valid, risky or invalid with a reason, and nothing is sent to anyone on the list. For larger lists, see bulk email verification and pricing.

Remove the accents now

Open the remove accents from CSV tool.