Spreadsheet

CSV opened with everything in one column

Nothing is broken here — the file is intact and the reader guessed wrong. The usual culprits are semicolon delimiters under a locale that expects commas, a missing BOM, or embedded quotes/newlines confusing the parser.

Stop doing this first

The safe order of operations

  1. 1

    Open the file in a plain text editor and look at the first two lines to see the real delimiter.

  2. 2

    Check the encoding — UTF-16 or a missing BOM makes Excel treat the whole line as one cell.

  3. 3

    Import instead of double-clicking: Data → From Text/CSV lets you pick delimiter and encoding.

  4. 4

    If quoting is broken, repair it with a proper CSV-aware tool rather than find-and-replace.

Commands that do the work

Inspect delimiter and encoding

head -2 data.csv && file -I data.csv

Convert encoding

iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 data.csv > data-utf8.csv

Re-delimit safely

csvformat -d ';' -D ',' data.csv > fixed.csv

Realistic odds

Likely recoverable — this is a parsing problem, not data loss.

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