Import long customer list from access db

I managed to produce an excel table with a header row being the InvoicePlane expected field titles but when I import it after copying the csv version in InvoicePlane_v1.4.4/uploads/import, I have an issue with accented letters in my original text and other characters like the accent separator and nothing gets imported.

I tried to replace all accented characters by their plain form (eg é|è => e), I then double quoted the text fields from within excel but the accent still poses a problem and breaks the import process.

Any help welcome (I have 1000 rows to import, retyping each record is not an option)

Thanks

PS: adding a php routine to convert any non-UTF8 characters to neutral would be great to ease import from non-english spoken text with accents and special chars (I used $ iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -c c.csv > clients.csv to fix my data but think php can do that on the fly too).