Related
I have a new install of Excel 2016, that hates CSV files. It opens them with everything in one column flagpole style, down column A, with commas and speech marks visible.
Salient points:
I have two machines, desktop and laptop, both running same version of Excel. Desktop works fine, opens the same problem files formatted correctly.
I can create CSV files on laptop, save those, open them again on laptop, and it's fine.
Even opening it in Notepad++, saving in the hope of some sort of file format normalisation, and still no good.
I have compared regional settings and almost all settings in Excel.
I tried renaming the file to TXT, it brought up the text file conversion dialogue, I chose comma delimited. First time it ignored that, still got everything in column A, second attempt, that actually worked, however, that is a pants solution, I want to be able to just natively open CSV files without saving as TXT, I use many different ones every day.
Anyone got any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
CSV files are character separated value files, not necessarily comma separated. For more than half the world the separator character is a semicolon (;), not a comma (,)
Excel 2016 properly respects your Windows regional settings, and uses the specified List Separator character
One solution is to change your regional settings for the List Separator attribute to the character you want Excel to default to using, e.g. a comma (,)
This can be changed in the operating system Control Panel, under Region settings, Additional Settings, List separator
For various reasons some people seem to have the incorrect regional settings for the culture they most commonly work in, and therefore have semicolon as the default separator
If you prefer not to change your operating system regional setting to what you think is normal for CSV files, you can change the default behavior in Excel with the Use system separators checkbox under the File/Options/Advanced menu
If you want custom options each time you open a CSV file, use the Data/From Text menu, but this becomes slow and awkward for lots of files
CSV References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator (see map of world using comma as decimal point separator, it's very common, and hence CSV's often use semicolon separators)
https://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/wiki/CSV_files_use_delimiters_other_than_commas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values (spec point 3)
https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/Comma-separated_values_%2528CSV%2529
https://parse-o-matic.com/parse/pskb/CSV-File-Format.htm
I've found a way of saving messy CSV files into a nice table format but I'm not sure if it will work for your case.
Data -> New Query -> From File -> From CSV
By opening the CSV file this way, a pop-up 'Query Editor' window will appear with a nicely organised table format where you can edit, save and load into your excel sheet.
I hope this helps.
For me the solution was to:
Data > From Text > Choose your csv file
Then you can define all the import settings for csv files.
I found another way to fix this, without changing your windows local settings.
In Excel, you go to File > Options > Advanced.
Un-check the "Use System Separators" within the Editing Options and change the Decimal separator with "," and the Thousands Separator ".".
Even it does look more like a bug than a feature of Excel 2016, it works without changing the Windows Local settings, and it's just a local Excel change.
Just had this same problem. Changing the file extension from csv to txt and opening in Excel brings up the classic wizard so you can map the strings to fields.
The correct answer is to edit your regional settings as suggested above (if a long term change in behavior is desired)
Control Panel -> Region -> Additional Settings -> List separator:
But for my purposes a simple Edit -> Find and Replace using Notepad to replace all commas with semi-colons was a quick and dirty solution that I preferred.
Despite the comment that csv means 'Character Separated Values', in Office 2016 my .csv file association to Excel still says 'Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values File'.
I have quite a complex csv file where none of the suggestions worked out for me. So I ended up using LibreOffice Calc for the job. It worked like a dream.
I had the same problem, I fixed it in this way (Excel 2020)
Data -> Text to Columns
Now you can configure as you wish the CSV delimiters/endlines...
I had the same issue on Mac OS X El Captain. The answer given here worked for me. Reproducing it here in case the link doesnt work in future:
Close the Excel application
Click on the Apple button
Select System Preferences
Select Language and Region
Click Advanced
Change the Decimal separator from a comma (,) to a full stop (.)
Then click on Ok/Save
Test the Excel import again
When changing the list separator, make sure it doesn't overlap with the decimal symbol and the digit grouping characters. I had to change my list separator to (,) my decimal to (.) end my digit grouping to ('). Now .CSV opens lekker!!!
In my excel, it's: data> get data> from file> from text/csv
Try opening in excel, then using text to columns, based on commas.
You could probably create some simple vba to open it in that way too.
This is the content of the excel file:
"Windows Excel","AndroMoney","20140227"
"Id","Valuta","Importo","Categoria","Sottocategoria","Data","Spese(Trasferimento Out)","Entrate(Trasferimento In)","Note","Periodicita'","Progetto","Pagatore/Beneficiario","uid"
"19","EUR","-1079.63","SYSTEM","INIT_AMOUNT","10100101","","Bank","","","","","116EUR-1079.63_26_102"
"20","EUR","-2662.9","SYSTEM","INIT_AMOUNT","10100101","","Credit Card","","","","","117EUR-2662.9_26_102"
"960","EUR","0","SYSTEM","INIT_AMOUNT","10100101","","Bank austria","","","","","265C6BD548CE41FEA0250BF4E19C392F"
"1","EUR","8","Food","Breakfast","20130326","Cash","","","","","","1EUR8_1_1"
And here is how Excel shows its content:
In another post they say it's due to the usage of the , instead of ;
Is it possible to solve the problem without changing Operating System settings?
You can select column A and go to Data - Text to Columns. Then use delimited and define , as the delimiter. This will delimit the data and show it correctly.
If you're asking how to make it delimit based on the comma when you open it, I didn't read the question that way. But instead of double-clicking the file to open, go to the Data tab and Get External Data from it, defining the delimiter.
I use a trick.
Change the extencion from CSV to TXT, the open the file with excel, define , as the delimitator character
In Excel 2010 and newer csv files are read correctly. In older versions you need to specify a separator during import in text import wizard.
I have a simple BCP command to query my MSSQL database and copy the result to a .csv file like this:
bcp "select fullname from [database1].[dbo].employee" queryout "c:\test\table.csv" -c -t"," -r"\n" -S servername -T
The issue comes when the fullname column is varchar separated by a comma like "Lee, Bruce". When the result is copied to the .csv file, the portion before the comma (Lee) is placed into the first column in Excel spreadsheet and the portion after the comma (Bruce) is placed in the second column. I would like it to keep everything in the first column and keep the comma (Lee, Bruce) . Does anyone have any idea how to achieve this?
Obviously you should set columns separator to something different than comma. I'm not familiar with the above syntax, but I guess these: -c -t"," -r"\n" are column and new line separators respectively.
Further you should either change default CSV separator in regional settings OR use import wizard for proper data placing in Excel. By the way, there are plenty of similar questions on SO.
I have a csv file with contents:
"x","y","-z"
When I import it I get:
How can I bypass this conversion?
Update
If you try:
"x","y",="-z,a"
The ",a" is not imported.
If you put a space in front:
"x","y",=" -z"
or
"x","y"," -z"
it will work fine
Prefix the values with equals signs
="x",="y",="-z"
Your problem is that by using the CSV extension, you are forcing excel to interpret the file using its very strict CSV conventions, and this will often go against whatever it is you're trying to do unless the CSV file was originally created by Excel. Your easiest, and most reliable method of importing this CSV file, is to rename it to a TXT file, and then use the import function in excel to coerce columns in exactly the way you want.
There is a complete difference in using Excel > Import and double-click a .CSV file. Different parsers are used.
Based on the comments above, I figured out that prepending a space before a '+' or '-' sign works for the double-click .CSV file case. So my file now contains e.g.
" +14";" -Foo"
I tried your first example in Excel 2003 and could reproduce your #NAME eror.
My solution was to open the text file and to specify the 3rd column as "Text" in the import wizard (3rd page) - along with choosing the correct delimiter and text qualifier (2nd page).
No changes needed to the text file.
I would prefer to solve such problem directly during the conversion, by giving the right column format, example: use Text format for the column that should contain operation sign:
Check this detail post: http://ask.osify.com/qa/854
Find and replace every instance of
+
with
' +
A single quote and space at the beginning should cancel out any +, -, or =.
You also will need to transform 1.5 numbers to 1,5 strings, so they don't changed to date type values.
For + - = I use space method " +...." - not great, but for my task was enough.
I'm working on a feature to export search results to a CSV file to be opened in Excel. One of the fields is a free-text field, which may contain line breaks, commas, quotations, etc. In order to counteract this, I have wrapped the field in double quotes (").
However, when I import the data into Excel 2007, set the appropriate delimiter, and set the text qualifier to double quote, the line breaks are still creating new records at the line breaks, where I would expect to see the entire text field in a single cell.
I've also tried replacing CR/LF (\r\n) with just CR (\r), and again with just LF (\n), but no luck.
Has anyone else encountered this behavior, and if so, how did you fix it?
TIA,
-J
EDIT:
Here's a quick file I wrote by hand to duplicate the problem.
ID,Name,Description
"12345","Smith, Joe","Hey.
My name is Joe."
When I import this into Excel 2007, I end up with a header row, and two records. Note that the comma in "Smith, Joe" is being handled properly. It's just the line breaks that are causing problems.
Excel (at least in Office 2007 on XP) can behave differently depending on whether a CSV file is imported by opening it from the File->Open menu or by double-clicking on the file in Explorer.
I have a CSV file that is in UTF-8 encoding and contains newlines in some cells. If I open this file from Excel's File->Open menu, the "import CSV" wizard pops up and the file cannot be correctly imported: the newlines start a new row even when quoted. If I open this file by double-clicking on it in an Explorer window, then it opens correctly without the intervention of the wizard.
None of the suggested solutions worked for me.
What actually works (with any encoding):
Copy/paste the data from the csv-file (open in a text editor), then perform "text to columns" --> data gets transformed incorrectly.
The next stap is to go to the nearest empty column or empty worksheet and copy/paste again (same thing what you already have in your clipboard) --> automagically works now.
If you are doing this manually, download LibreOffice and use LibreOffice Calc to import your CSV. It does a much better job of stuff like this than any version of Excel I've tried, and it can save to XLS or XLSX as required if you need to transfer to Excel afterwards.
But if you're stuck with Excel and need a better fix, there seems to be a way. It seems to be locale dependent (which seems idiotic, in my humble opinion). I don't have Excel 2007, but I have Excel 2010, and the example given:
ID,Name,Description
"12345","Smith, Joe","Hey.
My name is Joe."
doesn't work. I wrote it in Notepad and chose Save as..., and next to the Save button you can choose the encoding. I chose UTF-8 as suggested, but with no luck. Changing the commas to semicolons worked for me, though. I didn't change anything else, and it just worked. So I changed the example to look like this, and chose the UTF-8 encoding when saving in Notepad:
ID;Name;Description
"12345";"Smith, Joe";"Hey.
My name is Joe."
But there's a catch! The only way it works is if you double-click the CSV file to open it in Excel. If I try to import data from text and chose this CSV, then it still fails on quoted newlines.
But there's another catch! The working field separator (comma in the original example, semicolon in my case) seems to depend on the system's Regional Settings (set under Control Panel -> Region and Language). In Norway, comma is the decimal separator. Excel seems to avoid this character and prefer a semicolon instead. I have access to another computer set to UK English locale, and on that computer, the first example with a comma separator works fine (only on doubleclick), and the one with semicolon actually fails! So much for interoperability. If you want to publish this CSV online and users may have Excel, I guess you have to publish both versions and suggest that people check which file gives the correct number of rows.
So all the details that I've been able to gather to get this to work are:
The file must be saved as UTF-8 with a BOM, which is what Notepad does when you chose UTF-8. I tried UTF-8 without BOM (can be switched easily in Notepad++), but then double-clicking the document fails.
You must use a comma or a semicolon separator, but not the one that is the decimal separator in your Regional Settings. Perhaps other characters work, but I don't know which.
You must quote fields that contain a newline with the " character.
I've used Windows line-endings (\r\n) both in the text field and as a record separator, that works.
You must double-click the file to open it, importing data from text doesn't work.
Hope this helps someone.
I have finally found the problem!
It turns out that we were writing the file using Unicode encoding, rather than ASCII or UTF-8. Changing the encoding on the FileStream seems to solve the problem.
Thanks everyone for all your suggestions!
Use Google Sheets and import the CSV file.
Then you can export that to use in Excel
Short Answer
Remove the newline/linefeed characters (\n with Notepad++). Excel will still recognise the carriage return character (\r) to separate records.
Long Answer
As mentioned newline characters are supported inside CSV fields but Excel doesn't always handle them gracefully. I faced a similar issue with a third party CSV that possibly had encoding issues but didn't improve with encoding changes.
What worked for me was removing all newline characters (\n). This has the effect of collapsing fields to a single record assuming that your records are separated by the combination of a carriage return and a newline (CR/LF). Excel will then properly import the file and recognise new records by the carriage return.
Obviously a cleaner solution is to first replace the real newlines (\r\n) with a temporary character combination, replacing the newlines (\n) with your seperating character of choice (e.g. comma in a semicolon file) and then replacing the temporary characters with proper newlines again.
If the field contains a leading space, Excel ignores the double quote as a text qualifier. The solution is to eliminate leading spaces between the comma (field separator) and double-quote. For example:
Broken:
Name,Title,Description
"John", "Mr.", "My detailed description"
Working:
Name,Title,Description
"John","Mr.","My detailed description"
If anyone stumbling across this thread and is looking for a definitive answer here goes (credit to the person mentioning LibreOffice:
1) Install LibreOffice
2) Open Calc and import file
3) My txt file had the fields separated by , and character fields enclosed in "
4) save as ODS file
5) Open ODS file in Excel
6) Save as .xls(x)
7) Done.
8) This worked perfectly for me and saved me BIGTIME!
+1 on J Ashley's comment. I ran into this problem also. It turns out that Excel requires:
A newline character("\n") in the quoted string
A carriage return and newline between each row.
E.g.
"Test", "Multiline item\n
multiline item"\r\n
"Test2", "Multiline item\n
multiline item"\r\n
I used notepad ++ to delimit each row properly and to only use newlines in the string. Discovered this by creating multiline entries in a blank excel doc and opening the csv in notepad ++.
Overview
Almost 10 years after the original post, Excel hasn't improved in importing CSV files. However, I found that it is much better in importing HTML tables. So, one can use Python to convert CSV to HTML and then import the resulting HTML to Excel.
The advantages of this approach are: (a) it works reliably, (b) you don't need to send your data to a third party service (e.g. Google sheets), (c) no extra "fat" installations required (LibreOffice, Numbers etc.) for most users, (d) higher level than meddling with CR/LF characters and BOM markers, (e) no need to fiddle with locale settings.
Steps
The following steps can be run on any bash-like shell as long as Python 3 is installed. Although Python can be used to directly read CSV, csvkit is used to do an intermediate conversion to JSON. This allows us to avoid having to deal with CSV intricacies in our Python code.
First, save the following script as json2html.py. The script reads a JSON file from stdin and dumps it as an HTML table:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys, json, html
if __name__ == '__main__':
header_emitted = False
make_th = lambda s: "<th>%s</th>" % (html.escape(s if s else ""))
make_td = lambda s: "<td>%s</td>" % (html.escape(s if s else ""))
make_tr = lambda l, make_cell: "<tr>%s</tr>" % ( "".join([make_cell(v) for v in l]) )
print("<html><body>\n<table>")
for line in json.load(sys.stdin):
lk, lv = zip(*line.items())
if not header_emitted:
print(make_tr(lk, make_th))
header_emitted = True
print(make_tr(lv, make_td))
print("</table\n</body></html>")
Then, install csvkit in a virtual environment and use csvjson to feed the input file to our script. It is a good idea to disable cell type guessing with the -I argument:
$ virtualenv -p python3 pyenv
$ . ./pyenv/bin/activate
$ pip install csvkit
$ csvjson -I input.csv | python3 json2html.py > output.html
Now output.html can be imported in Excel. Line breaks in cells will have been preserved.
Optionally, you may want to cleanup your Python virtual environment:
$ deactivate
$ rm -rf pyenv
Multiline CSV can be imported easily in Excel versions with Power Query using following steps (tested in Excel 365 version 2207):
Go to Data-tab
Click "From Text/CSV" on the ribbon
Select file and click Import
Click "Transform Data" to open Power Query Editor
Click "Data source settings" on the Power Query Editor ribbon
Click "Change Source"
Select "Ignore quoted line breaks" from the "Line breaks" dropdown.
Click OK -> Close -> Close & Load
Paste into Notepad++, select Encoding > Encode in ANSI, copy all again and paste into Excel :)
I had a similar problem. I had some twitter data in MySQL. The data had Line feed( LF or \n) with in the data. I had a requirement of exporting the MySQL data into excel. The LF was messing up my import of csv file. So I did the following -
1. From MySQL exported to CSV with Record separator as CRLF
2. Opened the data in notepad++
3. Replaced CRLF (\r\n) with some string I am not expecting in the Data. I used ###~###! as replacement of CRLF
4. Replaced LF (\n) with Space
5. Replaced ###~###! with \r\n, so my record separator are back.
6. Saved and then imported into Excel
NOTE- While replacing CRLF or LF dont forget to Check Excended (\n,\r,\t... Checkbox [look at the left hand bottom of the Dialog Box)
My experience with Excel 2010 on WinXP with French regional settings
the separator of your imported csv must correspond to the list separator of your regional settings (; in my case)
you must double click on the file from the explorer. don't open it from Excel
On MacOS try using Numbers
If you have access to Mac OS I have found that the Apple spreadsheet Numbers does a good job of unpicking a complex multi-line CSV file that Excel could not handle. Just open the .csv with Numbers and then export to Excel.
Excel is incredibly broken when dealing with CSVs. LibreOffice does a much better job. So, I found out that:
The file must be encoded in UTF-8 with BOM, so consider this for all the points below
The best result, by far, is achieved by opening it from File Explorer
If you open it from within Excel there are two possible outcomes:
If it has only ASCII characters, it will most likely work
If it has non-ASCII characters, it will mess your line breaks
It seems to be heavily dependent on the decimal separator configured in the
OS's regional settings, so you have to select the right one
I would bet that it may also behave differently depending on OS and
Office version
This is for Excel 2016:
Just had the same problem with line breaks inside a csv file with the Excel Wizard.
Afterwards I was trying it with the "New Query" Feature:
Data -> New Query -> From File -> From CSV -> Choose the File -> Import -> Load
It was working perfectly and a very quick workaround for all of you that have the same problem.
With Excel 2019 I had a similar problem when working with CSV files via Data -> Import from text file / CSV. Once the connection is made and the data is synced, it reported xx error(s) because of shifted columns caused by the line breaks.
I managed to solve this by
Edit the query (Query -> Edit)
This opens the Power Query Editor
Go to Start -> Advanced Editor
This opens the query in text format, where line #2 had an instruction like
Source = Csv.Document(File.Contents("my.csv"),[Delimiter=",", .... , QuoteStyle=QuoteStyle.None]),
Change QuoteStyle.None to QuoteStyle.Csv
Click Finish
Apply & close
Documentation found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/csv-document
NB. I since found where this is "hidden" in the UI. In the Power Query-editor, click Data source settings, Change source (bottom left), and the Line breaks combo should say Ignore line breaks between quotes.
NB2. Working from Dutch Excel here so my above-mentioned translations of button captions etc. may be a little off.
What just worked for me, importing into Excel directly provided that the import is done as a text format instead as csv format.
M/
just create a new sheet with cells with linebreak, save it to csv then open it with an editor that can show the end of line characters (like notepad++). By doing that you will notice that a linebreak in a cell is coded with LF while a "real" end of line is code with CR LF. Voilà, now you know how to generate a "correct" csv file for excel.
I also had this problem: ie., csv files (comma delimited, double quote delimited strings) with LF in quoted strings. These were downloaded Square files. I did a data import but instead of importing as text files, imported as "from HTML". This time it ignored the LF's in the quoted strings.
This worked on Mac, using csv and opening the file in Excel.
Using python to write the csv file.
data= '"first line of cell a1\r 2nd line in cell a1\r 3rd line in cell a1","cell b1","1st line in cell c1\r 2nd line in cell c1"\n"first line in cell a2"\n'
file.write(data)
In my case opening CSV in notepad++ and adding SEP="," as the first line allows me open CSV with line breaks and utf-8 in Excel without issues
Replace the separator with TAB(\t) instead of comma(,).
Then open the file in your editor (Notepad etc.), copy the content from there, then paste it in the Excel file.
It appears that this is much easier in more recent versions of Excel:
Go to "Data" -> "Get Data (Power Query)"
In the dialogue that opens, select "Text / CSV" on the right
Search for the file and then click "Next" and follow the recommendations (in my case, Excel now correctly realized it's UTF8 and that cells were separated by ";" and the text identifier were double quotes (")
You're done!
This took a little moment to load but afterwards I had an auto-formatted table that looked really nice and that did understand that multi-line entries were still part of the same entry.
If you want the multi-lines to show correctly, simply format the cells and under "Alignment", click the checkbox for "Wrap text". That should solve the last of your issues.
Good luck! ;-)