Why your CSV shows garbled characters in Excel (and how to fix it)
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You download a CSV export — orders, bank transactions, survey answers — double-click it, and Excel shows Müller instead of Müller, or a column of Korean, Japanese or Russian names turns into unreadable symbols. The file is fine. Excel simply guessed the wrong character encoding.
Why it happens
A CSV file is plain text. Unlike an Excel workbook, it does not record how its characters were stored. Two families of encodings are common:
- UTF-8 — the universal standard. Most websites, Google Sheets, Macs and programming tools write CSV files in UTF-8.
- Legacy “ANSI” code pages — the older, language-specific encodings Windows has used for decades, such as Windows-1252 for Western Europe, CP949 for Korean or Shift_JIS for Japanese.
When you double-click a CSV, Windows Excel assumes the legacy code page of your system. A UTF-8 file read that way turns every non-English character into two or three wrong symbols — the classic é for é.
There is one exception: if the file starts with a three-byte marker called a byte order mark (BOM), Excel recognises it as UTF-8 and displays it correctly. Many websites export UTF-8 without that marker, which is why the problem is so common.
Fix 1: Import the file with the right encoding
- Open a blank workbook in Excel.
- Go to Data → From Text/CSV and choose the file.
- In the preview window, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and check that the preview looks right.
- Click Load.
This works with Excel alone, but you have to repeat it every time you open the file.
Fix 2: Convert the CSV to XLSX
The most robust fix is to convert the CSV into Excel’s own format. An XLSX workbook stores text unambiguously, so it opens correctly on every computer — no import dialogs, no guessing.
Drop the file into the CSV to XLSX converter. It detects the encoding automatically — UTF-8 as well as legacy encodings such as Windows-1252, CP949, Shift_JIS, GB18030 and Windows-1251 — and also detects whether values are separated by commas, semicolons or tabs. Conversion happens inside your browser, so exports full of customer or bank data never leave your computer.
If detection ever picks the wrong encoding, you can choose it yourself under Options.
Fix 3: Save CSVs “for Excel” with a BOM
If you need to keep the CSV format, save it as UTF-8 with a byte order mark:
- In Excel: File → Save As → choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited). This variant includes the BOM and opens correctly in Excel, Google Sheets and on Macs.
- With our converters: XLSX to CSV and JSON to CSV write UTF-8 with a BOM by default, so the result opens correctly when double-clicked in Excel.
Which fix should you use?
| Situation | Best option |
|---|---|
| You just need to look at one file now | Fix 1 — import with UTF-8 |
| You’ll share the file or work with it repeatedly | Fix 2 — convert to XLSX |
| Another system needs a CSV back | Fix 3 — UTF-8 CSV with BOM |
Don’t save a garbled file
If the text already looks garbled and you press Save, Excel writes the wrong characters back into the file and the original text is very hard to recover. Close without saving, then reopen the original using one of the fixes above.
Summary
Garbled CSV text is an encoding guess gone wrong, not a damaged file. Convert files you use often to XLSX, and when a CSV is required, save it as UTF-8 with a BOM. For the background, see Text encodings explained.