List import bug — Marketo treats blank rows in Excel as new leads

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

My org recently discovered that, in some (but not all) of our manual List Imports of email addresses into Marketo, Marketo created the empty rows of the spreadsheet as "new leads". Has this happened to anybody else? Curious to see if this is a widespread bug or a process issue.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, I have seen this before when cleaning up data.

I am not 100% sure why this happens. I think it may happen when the file type is not saved as CSV or there was something odd going on during the list creation in Excel. The ones I've seen have a dot or odd character in the lead.

You can just delete the offending records.

[Anonymous]

Pretty sure the only format you're allowed to import is CSV, you'll get an error if you try to import an .xls file. I've seen this happen with my lists and I've noticed highlighting the blank rows in excel and deleting them seems to prevent it from happening, but we still can't identify a pattern as to why it's happening with some csvs and not others and why some blank rows are treated as leads but some aren't.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hello Michelle Lopez​ & Nicole Macias​ !

The reason why this sometimes happens is that excel even if it doesn't show any information in spreadsheet cells, does in fact retain some information - so the cell appears empty but there's actually info hiding there that is not visible.

You are likely to end up with this situation if you had info in the cells and then cleared it, or if you copy pasted info in particular.

If you want to double check, a neat way to do it is to open your csv in Notepad++. It often displays some of these hidden artifacts.