CSV shows garbled characters in Excel? Open it as UTF-8 instead of double-clicking
You export customers from your shop, booking system or bank, double-click the CSV, and "José" shows up as "José". Names in other scripts become rows of question marks or symbols.
The file is almost never broken. Excel simply guessed the wrong character encoding when it opened it.
Why it happens
A CSV is plain text with no built-in label saying which encoding it uses. Most web apps export UTF-8. When you double-click, Excel may read the file using your system's older default encoding instead, so every non-ASCII character is decoded wrongly.
Plain English letters and numbers usually look fine either way, which is why the problem only shows up on some rows.
Fix: import instead of double-clicking (Windows)
- Open a blank workbook.
- Go to Data → From Text/CSV and pick the file.
- In the preview, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8).
- Check the preview looks right, then click Load.
If some columns are codes with leading zeros (ZIP codes, phone numbers, product codes), choose Transform Data and set those columns to Text before loading, so Excel doesn't drop the zeros.
Fix on a Mac
Recent versions of Excel for Mac have the same Data → From Text (or Get Data) import, where you can choose UTF-8 as the file origin. Menu names vary by version, so look for the import option under the Data tab rather than opening the file directly.
Saving a CSV that opens cleanly next time
When you save from Excel, choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) rather than plain CSV (Comma delimited). The UTF-8 version includes a small marker at the start of the file that helps Excel recognise the encoding on the next double-click.
What not to do
- Don't fix names by hand. If one row is garbled, many probably are.
- Don't save over the original after opening it wrongly. Saving can lock the garbled characters into the file. Keep the original export and re-import it.
- Don't paste the CSV into an online converter if it contains customer data. The fix above happens entirely on your computer.
Quick checklist
- ☐ Import with Data → From Text/CSV, not double-click
- ☐ File Origin set to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8)
- ☐ Code columns set to Text to keep leading zeros
- ☐ Original export kept untouched
- ☐ Save as CSV UTF-8 when sending the file on
General information. This article was written with the help of AI. Menu names can differ between Excel versions.