Why a CSV shows weird characters in Excel
The encoding mix-up behind garbled accents, and three ways to fix it.
You open a CSV in Excel and names like Müller or José appear with strange symbols in place of the accented letters. Euro signs and apostrophes turn into clusters of odd characters too. Nothing is wrong with your data. Excel is reading the file with the wrong character encoding.
What is going on
A text file is just bytes, and an encoding is the rule for turning bytes into letters. Almost every modern system writes CSV files in UTF-8, which handles every language. Excel on Windows, when you double-click a CSV, still assumes an older regional encoding such as Windows-1252, unless the file starts with a small marker called a byte order mark, or BOM. Without the BOM, every character outside plain English is decoded with the wrong rule, and each accented letter comes out as two or three junk characters.
The data is intact. Open the same file in Google Sheets, Numbers or a text editor and it looks fine.
Fix 1: add the BOM
If the file is correct UTF-8 and only Excel shows it wrong, run it through the fix encoding tool with the BOM option switched on. The characters are unchanged, but the marker tells Excel to read UTF-8, and it opens correctly on a double-click from then on.
Fix 2: convert to a real Excel file
An .xlsx file has no encoding ambiguity at all. The CSV to Excel converter reads the CSV correctly and saves a workbook that opens properly everywhere. It also keeps leading zeros in postcodes and phone numbers, which Excel strips when it opens a CSV directly.
Fix 3: import instead of double-clicking
In Excel, use Data, From Text/CSV, and set the File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8). Excel then reads the file correctly. This works, but you have to remember it every time, which is why the first two fixes are more practical for files you share.
When the file itself is damaged
Sometimes the garbled characters are saved into the file. This happens when someone opened a UTF-8 file in Excel, saw the mess, and saved it again. Now the junk characters are the data. You will see the problem in every program, not just Excel. The fix encoding tool has a repair mode for exactly this: it reverses the double encoding and restores the original letters. Its automatic mode detects this case in most files.
Quick diagnosis
| What you see | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong only in Excel, fine elsewhere | Missing BOM | Add the BOM, or convert to .xlsx |
| Wrong in every program | File was saved after being misread | Repair double encoding |
| Question marks or boxes | File saved in an old Windows encoding | Convert from Windows-1252 to UTF-8 |
Preventing it
- When exporting from Excel, choose CSV UTF-8 rather than plain CSV.
- When exporting from other systems for Excel users, include a BOM if the option exists.
- Never re-save a CSV that looks garbled. Fix the encoding first.