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CSV File Shows Garbled Characters in Excel (Encoding Fix)

CSV file displays ?? or garbled characters instead of accented letters, Asian characters, or special symbols when opened in Excel.

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Why CSV Files Show Garbled Characters

This problem — called "mojibake" — occurs when Excel opens a CSV file using the wrong text encoding. CSV files from non-English systems, databases, or web exports are typically saved as UTF-8. Excel (especially on Windows) defaults to Windows-1252 encoding, causing characters outside the ASCII range (accented letters, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, etc.) to display incorrectly.

Fix 1: Use the Text Import Wizard (Excel 2010–2021)

  1. Open Excel → Blank workbook
  2. Data → From Text/CSV
  3. Browse to your CSV file → click Import
  4. In the preview dialog, change File Origin (encoding) to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8)
  5. Check that the preview shows correct characters
  6. Click Load

Fix 2: Use Power Query (Excel 2016+, Recommended)

  1. Open Excel → Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV
  2. In the Navigator pane, change File Origin to UTF-8
  3. Click Transform Data to verify, then Close & Load

Fix 3: Open the CSV in Notepad++ and Resave

  1. Download Notepad++ (free)
  2. Open the CSV file in Notepad++
  3. Check the current encoding in the bottom-right status bar
  4. Encoding → Convert to UTF-8 with BOM (the BOM tells Excel to use UTF-8)
  5. Save the file
  6. Now open in Excel normally — the BOM signals UTF-8 encoding to Excel

Fix 4: Use Google Sheets (No Encoding Issues)

  1. Go to sheets.google.com → Create a new sheet
  2. File → Import → upload the CSV
  3. In import options, select UTF-8 as the character set
  4. Google Sheets handles CSV encoding correctly without the Excel quirk

Understanding the Root Cause

Modern data exports use UTF-8 (covering all languages). Excel on Windows defaults to the system locale encoding (typically Windows-1252 in Western locales). This mismatch only affects characters above ASCII 127 — English-only CSVs are unaffected.

Prevention

Request that the CSV sender add a BOM (Byte Order Mark) to the file, or save as UTF-8 with BOM rather than plain UTF-8. Excel automatically detects the BOM and uses the correct encoding.

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