The moment you meet a name like Carmenè or Gewürztraminer in your spreadsheet, the problem isn't really the character set. It's that the data has been through an encoding mismatch, and no amount of retyping will make it reliable. The real issue is that you're trying to import something that was never stored correctly in the first place. The fix isn't to preserve the accents or strip them out blindly. It's to standardise the encoding at the source, then decide whether you actually need the diacritics at all for your downstream tools.
Here's the practical truth: MySQL and Power BI don't care about accents as much as you think. They care about consistency. If you feed them a mix of "Márga" and "Márga," you'll get mismatched joins, broken filters, and a lot of head-scratching. The cleanest move is to normalise the text to plain ASCII before it ever touches your database. Excel has functions like `SUBSTITUTE` and `CLEAN`, but they get unwieldy fast when you're dealing with dozens of characters. A better approach is to use Power Query's built-in text transformation, or write a small VBA macro that maps accented characters to their base equivalents. That way, "Rosé" becomes "Rose," and "Gewürztraminer" becomes "Gewurztraminer." It's not poetic, but it's predictable, and predictable is what your import pipeline needs.
Now, you might be tempted to keep the accents because they look more authentic. That's a fair instinct, but it's a slippery slope. If you keep "Márga" in one column and "Marga" in another, you'll spend more time cleaning up after the import than you ever saved by preserving the original characters. The question isn't whether accents are "correct." It's whether your downstream systems can handle them consistently. If they can't, you're creating technical debt that will surface as duplicate records or silent data mismatches later. For most use cases, stripping to ASCII is the pragmatic, future-proof choice. You can always keep a separate column with the original text if you need it for reference, but your primary key and lookup fields should be clean.
The community advice you'll find often splits between "just use `SUBSTITUTE`" and "write a script to handle it." Both work, but neither addresses the root cause. Before you touch a single cell, check the file encoding. If you're opening a CSV that was saved in UTF-8 but Excel is reading it as Windows-1252, you'll see exactly the kind of mojibake you're dealing with now. Fix the import encoding first, then apply your character mapping. That order saves you from fighting the same battle twice. Start with a small sample, test your transformation, and then scale it. And if you're unsure whether to keep the accents, ask yourself one question: what does your database actually need to match on? If the answer is "names," keep them clean and simple. Your future self will thank you when the import just works.