Bdtyktl

I generate a CSV file with an extension .csv in which every piece of data in one line is separated with a comma:

1,2,3,4

1,2,3,4

The file is sent via email and I want that when a customer opens it she sees data arranged into columns.

Is such thing possible?

PS: I may freely change the delimeter.

Just use tab instead of comma. And if that doesn't work, give your tab delimited file an xls extension.

The behavior of Excel when opening CSV files heavily depends on your local settings and the used list separator under Region and language » Formats » Advanced. By default Excel will assume every CSV was saved with that separator. Which is true as long as the CSV doesn't come from another country!

If your customers are in other countries, they may see other results then you think.

_{For example, here you see that a German Excel will use semicolon instead of comma like in the U.S}

To confuse you even more, that setting interferes with the decimal symbol which can be separately set up under Excel Options » Advanced » Use system separators or via regional settings as shown above. Excel can't use the same symbol as decimal tab and list separator. It will automatically use comma or semicolon as a backup separator. Read more

I will take your example to create 3 files. Each with a different separator and open it with Excel.

    COMMA               SEMICOLON                     TAB 

Not the same as your Excel does? I thought so.

So lets manually change the extension from the same CSV files to XLS and look what happens now. First, Excel will throw up a warning that the file extension doesn't match the content and Excel tries to guess whats inside.

    COMMA        SEMICOLON                   TAB 

Conclusion: TAB + renaming + ignore warning = Win on every system?

Maybe, but I wouldn't be so sure for customers outside your own country.

The best method is to instruct your customers to first open a blank Excel and then go to Data » Get data from text and manually select comma as separator

if it's only to get the csv readable at every system, there's an undocumented trick: in the first line write SEP=;. This line tells EXCEL what character to use as separator (in fact you can use any (single) character (;,|@#'...))

NOTE: this line is just part of the csv file itself. It will not become part of the spreadsheed in EXCEL. that means, it will not be shown and it will not be written, no matter which format you define to write or export.

Another solution that I used in this situation, was to output a basic HTML file, instead of CSV. Excel can open this without an error. It can read at least some of the formatting in the file too.

This is the dumbest answer ever, but it worked. I use CSV files daily. I create them all the time and view with excel. Today, after 12 years of never seeing this problem, it happened to me. It wouldn't open a csv file and format the columns. Even some csv files I created last night with excel, would open into one column per line.

Solution: Check task manager for all open instances of Excel.exe. Kill all instances, and try to open the csv file again.

facepalm

In the short term if you only need to open a CSV file that has been sent to you from another country -

Open the file in wordpad and use find and replace to change every separator the issuing country has used (eg. ;) and replace with a comma. (eg ,).

Just check the issuing country does not use a comma in place of another symbol (eg in Spain they use a comma where we use a decimal place so you would have to find and replace the comma to a decimal place then find and replace the other symbol with the comma).

Not a long term solution but good enough to make the file itself readable if you are in a hurry and can't access the control panel at work.

I came over the same issue. I had CSV file that Excel was parsing wrongly and needed the Import Wizard.

Simple fix was to rename CSV to TXT and the Wizard came up helping to recognize the column structure properly.