Excel keeps showing garbled text when I open my CSV.

Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM, or in Excel use Data > From Text/CSV and explicitly pick the UTF-8 encoding during import.

.csv

Use caution

Comma-Separated Values

A plain-text tabular format with comma-separated fields. The lowest-common-denominator for exchanging tables between spreadsheets, databases, and scripts.

MIME types

text/csv
application/csv

What opens this file

Excel
Google Sheets
Numbers
Any text editor
LibreOffice Calc

How to open by OS

Windows

Excel opens CSVs on double-click; European locales often default to semicolons, which can break parsing.

Mac

Numbers or Excel. Use UTF-8 with BOM to avoid mojibake when Excel opens the file.

Linux

LibreOffice Calc, csvkit, xsv.

Ios

Numbers or Google Sheets.

Android

Google Sheets.

Safety notes

Cells starting with = or + are interpreted as formulas by Excel, enabling CSV Injection attacks that can run arbitrary commands. Always escape leading symbols when exporting user-submitted data.

Common mistakes

Non-ASCII characters often corrupt when Excel infers the encoding. Save as UTF-8 with BOM, or use Excel's 'From Text/CSV' import wizard and pick the encoding manually.
Fields that contain commas, quotes, or newlines must be wrapped in double quotes, with internal quotes escaped as "".

FAQ

Excel keeps showing garbled text when I open my CSV.: Save the file as UTF-8 with BOM, or in Excel use Data > From Text/CSV and explicitly pick the UTF-8 encoding during import.