Excel Is Opening CSV Files in One Column: 3 Solutions

Method 1 – Changing Regional Settings to Prevent Opening CSV Files in One Column in Excel

Steps:

• Open the Control Panel.
• Click on Clock and Region. Make sure, view by category is selected. Or you will need to select Region.
• A new window will appear.
• Select Change data, time or number formats under the Region section

• The Region window will pop up.
• Select “Additional settings…”.

• The Customize Format window will appear.
• Type comma (,) in the List separator field. Our CSV file is comma delimited, if yours is different, use it accordingly.
• Press OK.

• Open that CSV file; it will be on multiple columns.

• We modified the data to make it better.

Method 2 – Editing CSV File

Steps:

• See the data file is tab-delimited.

• Open that file in a text editor. We have opened it in Notepad.

• Insert the following lines at the top. As usual tab means four spaces; we have typed four spaces after the equal sign. If the delimiter were a comma, we have written “sep=,”. Change it according to your needs.

• If we open that file in Excel, the data will be in multiple columns. We showed you the second solution to the problem: Excel opens CSV files in one column.

Method 3 – Importing CSV File to Prevent Opening CSV Files in One Column in Excel

Steps:

• From the Data tab, select From Text/CSV.

• The Import Data window will appear.
• Navigate to the file location.
• Select the CSV file and press Import.

• Another window will pop up.
• From the Load dropdown menu, select “Load To…”.

• The Import Data dialog box will appear.
• Select Existing worksheet and point to the output cell. We selected cell B4 as the output location.
• Press OK.

• This action will import the CSV data into Excel. We can see our parser from the second solution is still there. You can simply delete row 5.

• We remove that row and perform some modifications to the dataset. This concludes the three possible solutions to the issue of Excel opening CSV files in one column.

Download Practice Workbook

• You can download the Excel output file from the link below.

• Additionally, you can download the CSV file from the link below. This is a semicolon-delimited file.

Related Articles

• How to Read CSV File in Excel
• CSV File Not Opening Correctly in Excel
• Open CSV File in Excel Without Formatting
• How to Open CSV with Delimiter in Excel
• How to Open Large CSV Files in Excel

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