How to properly import CSV files to Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a popular app to open CSV files, sometimes it does not display the csv files data correctly, This is because Excel opens the CSV file using the default windows encoding (Windows-1252), and when the encoding is different it may not display the data correctly. One other issue can be because the delimiter characters are not set properly, by default botsol app export CSV in a comma delimited format, with  double quote text qualifier, some other default setting in MS Excel also affect how the data is displayed.

Many of our users also use MS Excel to view the csv file and face similar issues, however this is a general issue and not specific to the botsol app.

Let's see how you can import the data to MS Excel with correct encoding and format.

Open MS Excel, Click File > New  and double click Blank WorkBook.

 

 

Click the "Data" tab, click the "From Text" icon as shown in screenshot below. It will open a dialogue box to select the file, Select the CSV file you want to import, and click Import.

 

It will open a Text Import Wizard.
From step 1 of the Text Import Wizard,  select "Delimited" as file type and select UTF-8 encoding "65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)", Click Next

 

From step 2 of the Text Import Wizard, select the delimiter Comma and uncheck all others, select Text Qualifier as  double quotes "", Click Next.

 

From step 3 of the Text Import Wizard, select General as the column data format and click Finish.

From the next window, you can select if you want to add this data to current sheet or create a new sheet, chose whatever you want.

Now you can see the data is showing correctly, there are no strange characters and all the columns are well formatted.

 

 

This simple method is helpful for users of botsol application, user can use this method to export google maps data to excel or export data from any of the botsol's crawlers.