CSV opened with weird characters (é, Ð). Fix the encoding.

A name that should read José shows up as José. Café becomes Café. Russian or Greek text turns into a wall of Ð and Ñ symbols. The data isn't corrupted — every character is still in there. It's just being read with the wrong decoder.

before: José after: José

Why this happens

Text files don't carry a label saying "I'm UTF-8." A CSV is just bytes, and the program opening it has to guess which character encoding those bytes represent. Your file was almost certainly saved as UTF-8 (today's default). Excel on Windows, unless you tell it otherwise, often reads a plain .csv as Windows-1252 instead.

In UTF-8 the letter é is stored as two bytes. Read those two bytes as Windows-1252 and you get é. That's the whole bug. It can also go the other way — a file saved as Windows-1252 and opened as UTF-8 — which usually shows up as � replacement boxes.

The manual fix: import and set the origin

Same trick as with dates: import instead of open.

  1. Blank workbook, then Data ▸ From Text/CSV.
  2. Choose your file. The preview window has a File Origin dropdown near the top.
  3. Set it to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8). The preview should snap to correct characters — José reads properly.
  4. If UTF-8 makes it worse, try 1252: Western European (Windows) instead — your file was probably saved that way.
  5. Load.

To stop it happening on the way out, when you save from Excel choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) rather than plain CSV.

Or just drop the file here and let the tool do it. It sniffs the encoding for you — checks for a byte-order mark, tries to decode as UTF-8, and falls back to Windows-1251 or Windows-1252 if that fails. You'll see the detected encoding and a preview of the fixed text, and you can override it if the guess is off. Download gives you a clean UTF-8 file, with an optional BOM so Excel opens it right next time. It all runs in your browser — the file never leaves your machine.

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