Excel CSV import errors
If your CSV worked before but breaks after opening or exporting from Excel, it’s usually an encoding, delimiter, quoting, or line-break issue. This guide covers the most common Excel-related CSV problems and how to find every affected row quickly.
Most common causes in Excel CSV exports
- Encoding changes (UTF-8 vs Windows-1252 / Latin-1, or added BOM)
- Delimiter changes (comma vs semicolon depending on locale settings)
- Quotes and commas inside values (Excel may not quote fields the way your importer expects)
- Line breaks inside cells (Alt+Enter creates embedded newlines that can break row parsing)
- Hidden characters (non-breaking spaces, invisible control characters)
Examples that commonly break imports after Excel
1) Wrong delimiter (Excel locale uses semicolons)
id;name;email
1;Ada;ada@example.com
2;Bob;bob@example.comIn some locales, Excel exports CSV with semicolons instead of commas. Tools expecting commas may treat each row as a single column.
2) BOM added to the header
id,name
1,AdaExcel (or a CSV export path) may add a BOM. Some importers interpret it as part of the first header name, causing schema/header mismatches.
3) Line break inside a cell (Alt+Enter)
id,notes
1,first line
second line
2,okA newline inside a value can split a single record into multiple rows unless the field is properly quoted.
4) Smart quotes / copy-paste punctuation
id,comment
1,“hello world” 2,”ok”Copy/paste into Excel can introduce smart quotes. Many parsers only treat the plain quote character (") as valid quoting.
5) Encoding mismatch (mojibake)
id,name
1,José
2,AnaIf UTF-8 text is read as Windows-1252/Latin-1 (or re-saved incorrectly), accented characters may appear corrupted and imports may fail validation.
How to diagnose Excel CSV issues quickly
Excel-related CSV problems are frustrating because the file often looks correct. CSV Checker scans the entire file and reports every structural and encoding issue at once—so you can fix everything before importing.