What you should know
CSV to Excel turns a raw data export into a real workbook. Opening a CSV directly in Excel often goes wrong: columns merged into one, unreadable accents, leading zeros dropped. The conversion sorts these out before the file is opened.
The separator is detected automatically (comma, semicolon, tab or pipe), and so is the encoding: UTF-8, or Windows-1252 for CSVs from older Excel versions. Cells that are clearly numbers become numbers you can use in formulas.
Strengths
- Separator detected: no more columns squashed into one
- Correct accents, whether the CSV is UTF-8 or Windows-1252
- Numbers become real numbers, ready for calculations
- Postcodes and references with leading zeros kept as text
Limitations to know
- A single sheet, with no formatting or column widths
- Dates stay as text and are not converted
- An ambiguous value such as "1,234" stays as text
- Numbers longer than 15 digits stay as text, as a precaution
When to use it
Convert a bank export, a contact list or a database extract before working on it in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If another program must read the file, keep the CSV: it is the simplest exchange format.
Quality, size and compatibility
No data is altered: every CSV cell ends up in the workbook, as a number when that is unambiguous and as text otherwise. This cautious choice avoids Excel's classic traps, such as a long reference being rounded or a postcode losing its leading zero.
Frequently asked questions
- Why were my columns squashed together in Excel?
- Excel expects the separator of your regional settings, while many CSVs use another one. The conversion detects the real separator and puts each value in its own column.
- Do my postcodes keep their leading zero?
- Yes. A value starting with zero, such as 01000, is kept as text: it is never turned into a number, which would drop the zero.