Fix garbled characters in a CSV file
When accents and special characters turn into symbols, the file was saved in one encoding and opened in another. CSVFix reads the file correctly and exports it in a form Excel understands.
Open CSVFixHow to do it
- Drop your CSV file on the page. CSVFix tries UTF-8 first and falls back to Windows-1252.
- Check the summary line, which shows the detected encoding, and look at the preview for accents.
- Tick UTF-8 BOM (for Excel) before downloading.
- Download the CSV. Accented letters should now open correctly.
Why it happens
A name like José can show up as José when UTF-8 text is read as Windows-1252, and the reverse produces question marks. Excel on Windows often treats UTF-8 files without a BOM as legacy text, which is why adding the BOM helps.
Questions
Which encodings are supported?
UTF-8 (with or without BOM) and Windows-1252. Other encodings such as UTF-16 are not supported yet.
Can it repair text that is already corrupted inside the file?
Not automatically. If the characters were damaged when the file was saved, the original export needs to be fixed.
Why add a BOM?
It tells Excel the file is UTF-8, so accents and non-Latin letters display properly.