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

Excel is incredibly broken when dealing with CSVs. LibreOffice does a much better job. So, I found out that:

• The file must be encoded in UTF-8 with BOM, so consider this for all the points below
• The best result, by far, is achieved by opening it from File Explorer
• If you open it from within Excel there are two possible outcomes:
  • If it has only ASCII characters, it will most likely work
  • If it has non-ASCII characters, it will mess your line breaks
• It seems to be heavily dependent on the decimal separator configured in the OS's regional settings, so you have to select the right one
• I would bet that it may also behave differently depending on OS and Office version