Importing CSV with line breaks in Excel 2007

Question

I\'m working on a feature to export search results to a CSV file to be opened in Excel. One of the fields is a free-text field, which may contain line breaks, commas, quota

Answer 1

If you are doing this manually, download LibreOffice and use LibreOffice Calc to import your CSV. It does a much better job of stuff like this than any version of Excel I've tried, and it can save to XLS or XLSX as required if you need to transfer to Excel afterwards.

But if you're stuck with Excel and need a better fix, there seems to be a way. It seems to be locale dependent (which seems idiotic, in my humble opinion). I don't have Excel 2007, but I have Excel 2010, and the example given:

ID,Name,Description
"12345","Smith, Joe","Hey.
My name is Joe."

doesn't work. I wrote it in Notepad and chose Save as..., and next to the Save button you can choose the encoding. I chose UTF-8 as suggested, but with no luck. Changing the commas to semicolons worked for me, though. I didn't change anything else, and it just worked. So I changed the example to look like this, and chose the UTF-8 encoding when saving in Notepad:

ID;Name;Description
"12345";"Smith, Joe";"Hey.
My name is Joe."

But there's a catch! The only way it works is if you double-click the CSV file to open it in Excel. If I try to import data from text and chose this CSV, then it still fails on quoted newlines.

But there's another catch! The working field separator (comma in the original example, semicolon in my case) seems to depend on the system's Regional Settings (set under Control Panel -> Region and Language). In Norway, comma is the decimal separator. Excel seems to avoid this character and prefer a semicolon instead. I have access to another computer set to UK English locale, and on that computer, the first example with a comma separator works fine (only on doubleclick), and the one with semicolon actually fails! So much for interoperability. If you want to publish this CSV online and users may have Excel, I guess you have to publish both versions and suggest that people check which file gives the correct number of rows.

So all the details that I've been able to gather to get this to work are:

1. The file must be saved as UTF-8 with a BOM, which is what Notepad does when you chose UTF-8. I tried UTF-8 without BOM (can be switched easily in Notepad++), but then double-clicking the document fails.
2. You must use a comma or a semicolon separator, but not the one that is the decimal separator in your Regional Settings. Perhaps other characters work, but I don't know which.
3. You must quote fields that contain a newline with the " character.
4. I've used Windows line-endings (\r\n) both in the text field and as a record separator, that works.
5. You must double-click the file to open it, importing data from text doesn't work.

Hope this helps someone.