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How to open a CSV file correctly in Excel

Troubleshooting incorrect CSV formatting

CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values," but the file standard accepts many different separators (comma, semicolon, tab..) to structure the data into different columns.

Earthster CSV files use commas as the separator/delimiter.

Opening a SCV file in Excel will most likely look incorrect, because Excel is using a wrong delimiter to show the content. In most cases, it is looking for semicolons instead of commas and since it doesn't find any, the content will end up in 1 column.

So instead of just double clicking to open the CSV file you need to import it into Excel and specify that your data is comma separated.

How to open a CSV file correctly in Excel

  1. Open a blank Excel file.

  2. Go to the Data tab and click From Text/CSV.

  3. Select the file and click Import.

  4. Set File Origin to UTF-8 and Delimiter to Comma, then click Load.


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