CSV to Excel Without Broken Columns or Missing Zeros

A CSV is just a text file with commas in it. And yet it can ruin an afternoon — accented characters turn into symbols, 00420 becomes 420, and April 3rd quietly becomes March 4th.

The cause is always the same: double-clicking lets Excel guess. Here's how to stop it.

Don't open CSVs by double-clicking

Use Data → Get Data → From Text/CSV instead. Excel gives you a preview where you set three things manually: encoding, delimiter, and the type of every column.

Set encoding to UTF-8. That fixes ninety percent of the mangled-character problems. If the file came out of an older regional system, try Windows-1252 or Windows-1250.

Delimiter matters more than people think. European exports often use semicolons because the comma is their decimal separator, and Excel won't always detect it.

Columns that must stay text

Click each column in the preview and switch it to Text wherever you have:

- phone numbers and postal codes (otherwise the leading zero disappears)

- account numbers, tax IDs, EAN barcodes (long digits get rounded into scientific notation)

- product codes like 1-2 or 3E4 (Excel turns these into dates or exponents)

Set date columns explicitly and tell Excel whether the source is DMY or MDY. Don't leave it to interpretation.

When you have fifty of them

Importing one at a time makes no sense when your store exports a fresh CSV every night. FileTools Batch Convert takes a whole folder and hands back XLSX files at once, with the encoding preserved.

The takeaway

Three settings — encoding, delimiter, column type — and your data lands clean on the first try. Everything after that is just repetition.

You can run the conversion at FileTools; it works in the browser and nothing gets uploaded anywhere.