Question 1

My postcodes and account numbers lost their leading zeros.

Accepted Answer

That is the type system doing its job badly for your data: 0056 looks like a number, so it becomes 56. Protect those columns in the CSV before converting by writing each value in the formula-style text form — an equals sign followed by the value in double quotes, so ="0056" rather than 0056 or even "0056", because ordinary quotation marks alone are not enough. Values written that way stay text all the way into the workbook. The affected columns are always the same ones: postcodes, account and invoice numbers, product codes, and phone numbers with a leading zero.

Question 2

A date column came out as numbers like 45306.

Accepted Answer

Spreadsheets store dates as a day count from a fixed origin, and the readable form is a display format laid over the top. When a date in the CSV is recognised, you get the day count; when the display format does not survive into the workbook, the raw number is what you see. Select the column in Excel afterwards and apply a date format and it reads correctly again — the value underneath was right all along. Alternatively, protect the column as text using the method above and format it yourself.

Question 3

My CSV uses semicolons. Do I need to change anything?

Accepted Answer

No. The separator is worked out from the file's contents, so comma, semicolon and tab-delimited files are all read correctly without a setting to find. Semicolons are standard across much of continental Europe, where the comma is the decimal separator and reusing it as a field separator would be ambiguous. This is also why opening such a file by double-clicking it in an English-locale Excel dumps every row into column A — Excel assumes commas, finds none, and treats the whole line as one value.

Question 4

The accented characters came out as question marks or odd symbols.

Accepted Answer

The file was not saved as UTF-8. Text is decoded as UTF-8 here, so a CSV written in a regional Windows code page or in UTF-16 produces replacement characters where the accented letters should be. Open the file in a text editor that shows the encoding — Notepad++, VS Code, BBEdit — and re-save it as UTF-8, or in Excel use Save As and pick CSV UTF-8 as the type. Convert the re-saved file and the accents come through intact.

Question 5

Why bother converting at all when Excel opens CSV files directly?

Accepted Answer

Because a CSV cannot hold anything except values. The moment you add a formula, a second sheet, a chart, a filter, a frozen header row, column widths or cell formatting, you need a workbook — save a CSV and all of it is discarded without ceremony. Converting first gives you a file that keeps your work. It is also the right move before sharing: a recipient opening an .xlsx gets your intended layout rather than their own locale's interpretation of your separators.

Question 6

What does the finished workbook look like?

Accepted Answer

One sheet, named Sheet1, with your rows laid into it from the first cell and nothing else added — no header styling, no frozen panes, no column sizing. It is deliberately a clean starting point rather than an opinion about your data. Everything you would normally do next, from widening columns to adding a filter row, behaves exactly as it would in any workbook you created yourself.

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Convert a CSV File Into a Real Excel Workbook

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