Data | 2 min

How to turn a CSV into Excel without breaking long numbers

Opening a CSV directly in Excel can turn long numbers into scientific notation and drop leading zeros. CSV to Excel avoids that, and lets you control the delimiter. It runs in your browser.

Steps

1. 1

   Open CSV to Excel

   Go to the tool and add your .csv, .tsv or .txt file.

2. 2

   Check the delimiter

   Detect automatically is right almost always. If columns come out wrong, choose Comma, Semicolon, Tab or Pipe.

3. 3

   Protect long numbers

   Keep Protect long numbers and leading zeros on so values such as 00123456789012345678 stay as text and are not turned into 1.23E+19.

4. 4

   Name the sheet and convert

   Optionally change the Sheet name, then convert and download the workbook.

Tips

• Phone numbers, account numbers and IDs are the usual casualties. Keep protection on for them.
• A European CSV often uses semicolons because commas are decimal marks. Choose Semicolon if it looks wrong.

Questions

Why does Excel change my numbers?

Excel guesses at the type of each column when it opens a CSV, so long digit strings can become scientific notation. Converting here writes them as text.

Is my file uploaded?

No. It is converted in your browser.