Excel to CSV Without Broken Accents or Lost Formulas

Excel is great until you have to hand your data to something that isn't Excel. That's when CSV shows up: plain text, works everywhere, survives every migration. The catch is that Excel's own CSV export quietly wrecks the file.

Here's what actually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.

Save As CSV only saves one sheet

Excel exports the active sheet. If you have twelve, you get one. No warning. You find out when an import job comes up short.

Export the sheets by hand, or use a converter that reads the whole workbook and hands back one file per sheet.

The accent problem is an encoding problem

A CSV made with the plain "CSV (Comma delimited)" option saves in your system encoding, not UTF-8. Send that file to someone else and every accented character lands as a question mark. On a Mac it often looks fine on your screen and broken everywhere else.

Use File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) instead. If Excel only offers the old option, your data has to go through something else.

Formulas, dates, and leading zeros

CSV keeps values, not formatting. Formulas become their last result. Green fills, bold headers, number formats — gone. That's not a bug, it's the format.

More dangerous: 00742 turns into 742, and 03/04/2026 becomes 3 April in one country and 4 March in another. Set the column types before you export, or fix them after import. Those are the options.

When you export all day

Daily exports from a dashboard or an ERP don't belong in a Save As dialog. FileTools Batch Convert reads a whole folder of workbooks and turns them into clean CSVs, with the encoding left intact.

Takeaway

CSV is the lowest common denominator, and that's exactly why it works. Just don't let Excel pick the encoding for you.

FileTools runs the conversion in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.