Make sense of CSV.

Look up a term

The CSV vocabulary that trips people up, defined in plain English.

• CSV Glossary — 22 terms — delimiters, quoting, encoding, the BOM, line endings, RFC 4180, flattening and more.

Fix what's broken

The problems that actually bite, and how to solve each.

• Why Your CSV Opens Wrong in Excel — CSV looks broken in Excel? Here's every way Excel mangles a CSV — all data in one column, scientific notation, lost leading zeros, shifted dates, garbled characters — and the fix for each..
• How to Fix CSV Encoding Problems — café showing as café? A � replacement character, or  on the first header? Those are CSV encoding mismatches.
• CSV Delimiters Explained: Comma, Semicolon, Tab & Pipe — The comma isn't the only CSV delimiter.
• CSV File Too Large to Open? How to Handle Big CSVs — A CSV too big for Excel or your text editor? Here's why it won't open, the real row limits, and how to view, filter and query a multi-hundred-MB CSV right in your browser — no upload, no install..
• CSV Has Extra Blank Rows? Line Endings, Explained — A blank row between every row, trailing empty rows, or the whole file read as one line? These are line-ending problems (CRLF vs LF).
• How to Keep Leading Zeros in CSV Files — Zip codes, SKUs and IDs lose their leading zeros every time you open the CSV in Excel — 00420 becomes 420.
• Fix 1.23E+15 in CSV Files — Order numbers and card IDs showing as 1.23457E+15 in Excel? Worse: saving rounds them permanently.
• Excel Changed Your CSV Dates — 03/04 became April 3rd? Product codes turned into dates? Excel reinterprets CSV dates by your locale and saves the result.

Get something built

From a raw file to a working dashboard.

• How to make a dashboard from a CSV — Drop a file, get charts, KPIs and filters — start to finish in under a minute.

Drop a CSV.

→ Open the dashboard builder

Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.