Why accents and symbols look wrong when opening a CSV in Excel (and how to fix it)

CSV files are simple text, but small differences between systems cause big headaches when you open them in Excel. Here are the usual problems and their fixes.

Accents and symbols look like é or ?

The file was saved in one text encoding and opened as another. Our tools detect old Windows encodings automatically and save files as UTF-8 with a marker that tells Excel how to read it. Run the file through Convert CSV / Excel (CSV to CSV) or open it as Excel with "Convert to Excel".

Everything appears in one column

Many countries use a semicolon as the separator because the comma is used for decimals. Convert to Excel (.xlsx), which has no separator problem, or choose "CSV (semicolon)" when your Excel expects semicolons.

Leading zeros disappear (phone numbers, postcodes)

Excel treats them as numbers when opening a CSV. Converting to .xlsx keeps values as text where they are not plain numbers. Phone numbers stored with a + or spaces are kept exactly.

Blank rows, extra spaces and repeated headers

Clean CSV / Excel trims spaces, removes empty rows and columns, removes header rows repeated in the middle of exports, and can make text lowercase, UPPERCASE or Title Case.

Need a tab-separated file?

Some systems import TSV only. Convert CSV / Excel converts between CSV, TSV, semicolon CSV and Excel.