CSV in Excel: fixing broken characters
Opened a CSV in Excel and instead of letters you see gibberish like 'Ð РёС'? It's an encoding issue, and it's easy to fix.
Why characters break
Most CSV files are saved in UTF-8, while Excel on Windows opens them as the legacy local encoding by default. The mismatch turns non-Latin text into an unreadable mess. The data itself is intact — only its display is wrong.
The most reliable fix
Convert the CSV into a real Excel file (.xlsx) with the CSV → Excel converter. An .xlsx has encoding baked in correctly, so it opens cleanly — text intact, columns split as they should be.
Alternative without converting
- In Excel: Data tab → From Text/CSV → pick the file and UTF-8 encoding.
- Or open the CSV in a text editor and re-save it in the right encoding.
But that's manual every time; converting to .xlsx solves it once and for all.