How to open a CSV file in Excel without breaking accents and columns
Why CSV files open with garbled characters or everything in one column, and three reliable ways to get clean data into Excel or back out as CSV.
· 2 min read
You double-click an export from your bank, online shop or CRM and Excel shows é instead of é, or crams every value into column A. Both problems have simple causes.
Problem 1: garbled accents (encoding)
CSV files are plain text, and text needs an encoding. Most modern systems export UTF-8, but Excel on Windows often assumes an older regional encoding unless the file starts with an invisible marker called a BOM. The result: é becomes é.
Problem 2: everything in one column (delimiter)
“Comma-separated” isn't always commas. In countries that write decimals with a comma (France, Germany, Morocco and many others), Excel expects semicolons between columns — and exports use them too. Open a comma file with French settings (or the reverse) and the columns collapse.
Solution 1: convert to a real Excel file
The most reliable fix is to not open the CSV in Excel at all. CSV to Excel reads the CSV in your browser, detects the delimiter automatically, handles quoted fields with commas and line breaks, and writes a proper .xlsx workbook — with numbers stored as numbers so formulas work, a bold frozen header and readable column widths. Values with leading zeros (postcodes, phone numbers) stay intact.
Solution 2: use Excel's import wizard
In Excel: Data → From Text/CSV, then pick 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) as the file origin and the right delimiter. It works, but you'll repeat it for every file.
Going the other way: Excel to CSV
When a web app asks for a CSV import, Excel to CSV exports each sheet with the delimiter you choose. Pick UTF-8 with BOM if the file might be reopened in Excel, and plain UTF-8 for databases and code.
For developers
APIs speak JSON, spreadsheets speak CSV. CSV to JSON and JSON to CSV convert between them, flattening nested objects into columns.
Watch out for automatic conversions
Excel may silently turn values like 1-2 into dates or long IDs into scientific notation (1.23E+15). Converting to .xlsx with text preserved avoids most of these surprises.