Exporting Leads to Excel: Arabic Names, UAE Phone Numbers and Formulas

Why does a leads export break in Excel?

A CSV file is plain text, and Excel has to guess what each cell is. Three guesses go wrong for a UAE sales team. It can misread the text encoding, so an Arabic name arrives as symbols. It can read a phone number as a number, so a long one turns into scientific notation. And it can read a cell that starts with an equals sign as a formula. Each has a fix, and each fix has to be in the export itself, because the person opening the file does not control any of them.

What does the CSV standard say?

RFC 4180 is the closest thing CSV has to a standard. It says records are "delimited by a line break (CRLF)", that a field containing a comma, a line break or a double quote "should be enclosed in double-quotes", and that a double quote inside a quoted field "must be escaped by preceding it with another double quote." Notes written by a rep often contain commas and line breaks, so this quoting is what keeps one lead on one row.

The same document says "common usage of CSV is US-ASCII", and it does not mention a byte order mark at all. So the standard tells you how to lay out rows and says nothing useful about Arabic text. That gap is where the first problem lives.

Why do Arabic names turn into symbols?

Because a plain text file does not say which encoding it uses. Microsoft's page on the Unicode standard notes that a byte order mark can be used with UTF-8, but that it "is only used as a signature" to tell a UTF-8 file apart from an ASCII one. Practice. MAJ Leads writes every export as UTF-8 and puts that signature at the start of the file, so a program that looks for it sees UTF-8 straight away. We add it as a precaution. We did not test every spreadsheet program, and we do not claim that a file without it always fails.

Why does a UAE phone number turn into 9.71E+11?

Because Excel reads a column of digits as a number. Microsoft's number formats page says the General format "uses scientific (exponential) notation for large numbers (12 or more digits)." A UAE mobile number written with its country code and no plus sign, such as 971501234567, has exactly 12 digits, so it can show as 9.71E+11 and the real number is gone from view.

Practice. MAJ Leads writes a nine-digit UAE mobile number in groups, for example +971 50 123 4567, so the cell reads as text and keeps every digit. That is our own reasoning from how Excel treats numbers, not a rule in a standard. Numbers that are not nine-digit UAE numbers are left as they are stored. The same number is also what your reps tap to call, so a damaged phone column is not only an eyesore. If you want the other half of that story, read how we read UAE phone numbers when a lead arrives.

What is CSV formula injection?

A lead form is open to the public, so a name or a note can hold anything a visitor types. OWASP describes CSV injection as what happens when "websites embed untrusted input inside CSV files" and a spreadsheet program then treats the content as a formula. It lists a leading equals sign, plus, minus, at sign, tab and carriage return as the characters that cause this.

The mitigation OWASP gives is to quote each field and put a single quote in front of a risky cell. It also warns that quoting alone "is not reliable in Microsoft Excel after saving and re-opening the CSV file", which is why the prefix matters. Practice. MAJ Leads puts an apostrophe before any cell that starts with one of those characters, then applies the RFC 4180 quoting on top. A phone cell in the strict shape of a plus sign, digits and spaces cannot carry a formula, so it is written as is.

What is in the MAJ Leads export?

The file is built page by page, so a workspace with many thousands of leads does not have to fit in memory. It is a plain list, so it also carries imported leads and wrong numbers. Our guide to the quiet lead import covers the way in, and this is the way out.

Does an export answer a PDPL data request?

Only in part. Article 14 of the PDPL gives a person the right to obtain the personal data they provided to a controller "in a structured and machine-readable manner", but only where the processing rests on their consent or on a contract and is done by automated means. It also lets them ask for the data to be transferred to another controller "whenever this is technically feasible." A sales enquiry may rest on neither basis, so check which one applies before you answer.

Practice. The workspace export lists every lead, not one person. For a single person's request, filter the file to their row and send only that row. Keep the file somewhere with access control and delete your copy when you are done, because Article 5 asks that personal data is kept securely. Our PDPL data requests guide sets out the full procedure. No lawyer has reviewed this page.

Where does this leave your lead list?

Your leads stay yours. The owner can download them as a spreadsheet at any time from Settings, and the file opens with Arabic names, phone numbers and notes intact. See how it works and pricing.