CSV to Excel: How to Convert Without Broken Columns

You export data from a shop system, your bank or a CRM, double-click the CSV — and Excel crams everything into a single column, turns special characters into gibberish and silently deletes the leading zeros from your postal codes. CSV looks trivial (it is just text with separators, after all), but the details ruin it surprisingly often. Here is how to get clean Excel tables reliably.

The quick way: use a converter

Our free CSV to Excel converter detects the separator and text encoding automatically and produces a proper .xlsx file with cleanly split columns — usually the fastest fix when a CSV misbehaves. The reverse direction, Excel to CSV, works there too.

Problem 1: Everything lands in one column

CSV officially means “comma-separated values” — but tools in many European locales export with semicolons instead, because the comma serves as decimal separator (12,50 €). If Excel expects the wrong separator, the whole row stays glued together. The manual fix: do not double-click the file. Open a blank workbook, use Data → From Text/CSV, and Excel shows a preview where you pick the correct delimiter.

Problem 2: Umlauts and special characters turn to garbage

“ü” instead of “ü”, “€” instead of “€” — a classic encoding mismatch: the file is UTF-8, but Excel reads it as an old Windows codepage (or vice versa). In the Data → From Text/CSV dialog you can set the file origin to “UTF-8” manually. Systems that need to feed old Excel versions should ideally export “UTF-8 with BOM”, which Excel recognizes automatically.

Problem 3: Leading zeros disappear

Postal codes like 01067, phone numbers, article numbers: Excel interprets them as numbers and strips the zero — and once saved, the data is gone for good. The safe route is the import dialog again: set those columns to type Text during the import preview. This cannot be repaired after the fact, only prevented.

When you should keep CSV instead

The other direction matters too: whenever a system asks for a data import (newsletter tools, accounting software, marketplaces), it usually wants CSV, not Excel. Formulas, colors and multiple sheets do not survive in CSV — it carries pure data. So: for exchanging data between systems, CSV; for humans who want to read, filter and calculate, Excel.