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Semicolons, commas and broken accents

In much of Europe and Latin America Excel saves “CSV” with semicolons, because the comma is the decimal separator. Other programs expect commas. And a file saved in Windows-1252 shows é instead of é when opened as UTF-8.

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Change the delimiter

  1. Open the file in Rowlode. The delimiter is detected automatically (check the line under the summary; change it in Delimiter if needed).
  2. In Export and split choose CSV and the new delimiter: comma, semicolon, tab or pipe.
  3. Press Export. Fields that contain the new delimiter, quotes or line breaks are quoted correctly.

Fix the encoding

Rowlode detects UTF-8 and UTF-16 (with or without BOM) and falls back to Windows-1252 for other files. If accents still look wrong, choose the right encoding in the Encoding menu – for example Windows-1250 for Central European files, Windows-1251 for Cyrillic, Shift_JIS for Japanese. Exports are always UTF-8.

Make Excel show accents correctly

Excel on Windows assumes the local code page for CSV files without a BOM. Keep Add a UTF-8 BOM ticked (the default) and Excel will show é, ñ, ç, ã correctly – or export straight to .xlsx, where this problem doesn’t exist.

Questions and answers

Will the numbers change?

No. A CSV export writes every value exactly as it is in the source (only the delimiter and quoting change). In .xlsx exports, plain numbers become numbers and everything else stays text.

What about the decimal comma?

Values like 1234,50 are kept as they are. If you change semicolons to commas, those fields are quoted, so they are not split.

Last updated: 2026-10-26