Convert Excel to CSV

Why "Save as" is not enough

Excel can export to CSV, but it uses your regional separator without telling you and it does not always mark the encoding. The result is the classic file that looks fine on your machine and opens on somebody else's as a single column, or with every accented character turned into gibberish.

Here you pick both explicitly and know exactly what you are downloading.

The separator

• Comma is the standard and what almost any system, database or API expects.
• Semicolon is what Excel expects in Spain and much of Latin America, because in those regional settings the comma is the decimal separator.

Rule of thumb: if a program is going to read the CSV, use a comma. If a person is going to double-click it into Excel, try the semicolon first.

The UTF-8 mark (BOM)

"Excel-friendly" is enabled by default and prepends an invisible three-byte mark to the file. Without it, Excel on Windows opens the CSV using the system encoding and mangles every accented character.

Turn it off only when the file will be consumed by a program that chokes on those three bytes — some older importers do.

Multiple sheets

A CSV has no sheets: it is a single block of plain text. So if your workbook has several, you can choose between converting only the first one or generating one CSV per sheet, delivered together in a ZIP named after each sheet.