CSV shows wrong characters in Excel — the UTF-8 fix
2026-09-22
You export a CSV from Shopify, Google Ads or Analytics, double-click it, and names like José or 東京 come out as José or garbage. The file is fine — Excel guessed the wrong encoding.
Use the tool
Why it happens
Almost every web service writes CSV as UTF-8. Excel, when you double-click a CSV, assumes your system's legacy code page instead. The mismatch mangles anything outside plain ASCII. A three-byte marker at the start of the file — the BOM — tells Excel it is UTF-8, and then everything displays correctly.
Fastest fix: convert to XLSX
Drop the CSV into Excel ↔ CSV and download the .xlsx. XLSX has no encoding ambiguity and opens correctly everywhere. The header row is bold and columns are sized to their content, so you can start working immediately.
Going the other way
When a platform wants a CSV upload — product imports, keyword lists — convert your XLSX with the same tool. The output has a BOM, so it opens cleanly in Excel and is read correctly by UTF-8 systems.
Doing it in Excel alone
Data → From Text/CSV, then set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8). It works, but you have to repeat it every time and saving can break the file again. Converting once to XLSX is simpler.