4 min read
CSV opening as a single column in Excel? Comma, semicolon, and how to choose
By Quentin Delepierre, Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant
You double-click a CSV file and instead of a clean table, everything piles up in column A. This classic isn't a bug: it's a convention gap between Excels around the world. Here's the two-minute explanation, and how ExcelifyXML handles it for you.
Why your CSV opens as a single column
In France (and much of Europe), the comma is the decimal separator: €12,50. French Excel therefore can't also use it to separate columns — it expects a SEMICOLON. An English-locale Excel expects a comma.
The result: a comma CSV opened in a French Excel (or the reverse) shows everything in one column. The file isn't broken — it just speaks the other convention.
What ExcelifyXML does by default
The generated CSV follows the site language's convention: semicolon when you use ExcelifyXML in French, comma in English. It also ships a UTF-8 BOM, the invisible marker that guarantees accented characters display correctly in Excel on double-click.
In the vast majority of cases you have nothing to do: the file opens cleanly, columns and accents included.
Changing the separator: Advanced options
- On the Upload page, drop your XML file: the free preview shows up.
- Below the preview, click “Advanced options” to unfold the panel.
- Under “CSV separator”, pick Semicolon (;) for French/European Excel, or Comma (,) for English Excel and data tools (scripts, pandas…).
- Click “Transform to CSV”: the downloaded bundle uses your choice.
File already downloaded? Two fixes without re-transforming
- In Excel: select column A, then Data → Text to Columns → Delimited → tick the right separator. The table rebuilds without touching the file.
- In LibreOffice or Google Sheets: use the import flow (both detect or let you pick the separator on open).
What about reconstruction?
It doesn't matter: the Rebuild page finds the separator on its own — comma, semicolon, tab, vertical bar (|)… — as well as the file's encoding (CSV UTF-8 with or without BOM, Windows or Mac "CSV", MS-DOS CSV). The "sep=;" line Excel reads at the top of some files is accepted too. Whatever spreadsheet re-saved your CSV and whatever its convention, the rebuilt XML is identical.
What does stop it: a save that lost characters. Excel's classic "CSV" format replaces what it can't write (Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese…) with "?": the reconstruction notices it, tells you, and suggests saving again as "CSV UTF-8".
Transform your XML with the right separator for your spreadsheet:
Transform a file