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Why does Excel rely on Windows Country settings when opening a .csv file?

Bas de Reuver (epi) 0 Reputation points
2025-10-16T08:42:02.3166667+00:00

In Excel when you open a .csv file by double clicking it in the explorer, or File-Open it blindly relies on the Windows Country or Region settings of the current pc.

This may work when you only open csv files created on pc's with for example United States settings, but doesn't work with csv from Mexican settings (date=dd/MM/yyyy) or Brazilian settings (separator = ; semicolon), and vise versa. And csv files are typically meant for DATA TRANSFER, so it's very common to receive csv files from another countries, that uses different separator, decimal and date formats.

So in practice Excel almost never opens a .csv file in a straight forward way without messing up the data. If everyone exchanging csv files has to guess the format of the data dates/decimals/separators etc. it kind of loses it's purpose.

I know it's not standardized, but some sort of automatically inferring from the data will work in like 99% of the cases. Microsoft is such a big company, and Excel is arguably the killer app or flag-ship application, I mean practically everybody has used it at some point. Numbers on Mac and LibreOffice Calc don't have these problems when opening a .csv file, why it this still an issue for Excel?

Could you please fix this? So I mean add some sort of automatic column detection or inferring of data when opening a csv file

ps: I tried asking this on the Microsoft Excel Team AMA on reddit but the answer they gave doesn't work

pps: I've selected the "child subitem tag"=Android for this post because when I select "Windows" I keep getting an error when saving "Please fix the following issues to continue: We encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later. If this issue continues, please open a ticket at https://sitehelp.microsoft.com."

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For education | Android
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  1. Michelle-N 9,420 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2025-10-16T10:06:23.6733333+00:00

    Hi @Bas de Reuver (epi)

    Thank you so much for contacting Microsoft Q&A Forum.

    Based on your description, I understand your frustration lies with how Excel automatically opens .csv files. It relies strictly on the current PC's Windows regional settings to interpret the data, which often leads to errors when the CSV is created in a country with different formatting standards (e.g., comma vs. semicolon separators, MM/DD/YYYY vs. DD/MM/YYYY date formats, or period vs. comma decimal separators).  

    After testing and researching your query, I can confirm I encountered the same behavior. I recognize how this can be a major point of friction for you and many other users who work in a global context. 

    As a moderator, my main role is to help users like yourself find official documentation and guide them toward the appropriate channels for various situations. I believe your suggestion to implement an automatic column detection or data inference feature is critically important and would be a massive improvement for the entire Microsoft product user base.

    I also see that other users have shared the same idea on the official Feedback Portal, which makes me optimistic that this will be addressed in a future update. 

    In the meantime, should you need them, here are a couple of workarounds you can use to correctly import your CSV files: 

    Workaround 1: Use 'Get Data from Text/CSV'  

    Instead of double-clicking the file, import it through Excel's Power Query tool. This gives you full control over the import settings. 

    Go to the Data tab on the Ribbon > In the "Get Data" group, click on From Text/CSV > Select your .csv file and click Import > A new window will appear. Here, you can manually set the File Origin, Delimiter (it usually detects the correct one, but you can change it from comma to semicolon, etc.), and how data types should be detected > Once you are satisfied with the preview, click Load. 

    Workaround 2: Temporarily Change Your Windows Region Settings 

    You can find a detailed guide on how to do this on Microsoft's official support page > Change regional format settings in Excel for the web

    I hope these suggestions help manage the issue in the short term. Thank you again for taking the time to provide such valuable feedback. 

    Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

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