When exporting large Activity Input Reports from FAR to Excel, some special characters (such as apostrophes, hyphens, or quotation marks) may appear incorrectly. For example, users may see characters like —, Äú, or Äôs instead of standard punctuation. This occurs because Excel may not automatically apply the correct text encoding when opening the exported file.

To avoid character display issues, import the report into Excel instead of opening it directly by following these steps:

1. Open Excel
2. Select Data > Get Data > From File > From Text/CSV
3. Choose the downloaded report file
4. Set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF‑8)
5. Select Import

This ensures that punctuation and special characters render correctly.