Sumac stores all data using the UTF-8 (utf8mb4) character encoding, which means it supports a wide range of characters beyond standard English letters — including accented characters (é, ñ, ü), symbols (©, ™, →), characters from non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, etc.), and emoji (, , ).

You can enter special characters directly into most Sumac fields — names, notes, addresses, custom fields, and more. Sumac will store and display them as entered.

Common sources of special characters include:
• Copy-pasting text from Word, Excel, or web pages
• Names or addresses containing accented letters
• Emoji or symbols entered in notes or descriptions

When importing data into Sumac, ensure your source file is saved in UTF-8 encoding. Files saved in other encodings (such as Windows-1252 or Latin-1) may cause special characters to display incorrectly. Most spreadsheet applications (Excel, Google Sheets) allow you to export as CSV with UTF-8 encoding.

If you see unexpected characters (such as ’ instead of ', or é instead of é), this is typically a sign of an encoding mismatch in an imported file rather than a limitation in Sumac itself.

If you are experiencing issues with special characters appearing incorrectly in Sumac, please contact Sumac Support — we can help diagnose whether the issue is related to your data source, import format, or display settings.