Excel and CSV

The flexibility of Excel with CSV files is quite limited, so limited even that you cannot use your own field delimiter, text enclosure and encoding when opening a CSV file.

How to set your delimeters for Excel?

In order to get Excel to open a CSV file directly you need to set your delimiters to the the following settings:

The field delimiter needs to be set to a comma (,) or semi-colon (;), this will depend on your local computer regional settings. The text enclosure needs to be set to a double quote (").

With the delimiters set like this, Excel will be able to open your file and show all the data in rows and columns.

Alternatively, it is possible to set the export type to HTML (as of version 2.0) which will create an HTML table that Excel can read.