SILENT MAJORITYOFFLINE TOOLS

Practical walkthrough

Fix a semicolon CSV for Excel without uploading it

Turn a small European-style CSV export into an Excel-friendly copy. Use the practice file first, then repeat the same checks with your own data.

Open CSV Fixer (new tab)

1. Start with a practice CSV

Download the practice CSV (one fictional data row). The separator is a semicolon, the date uses day/month/year, and the name has extra spaces.

ID;Date;Name
00123;31/12/2025; Maya

2. Choose the date order and review the changes

  1. Open CSV Fixer using the button above, then select Browse files and choose semicolon-dates.csv.
  2. Keep Standardize dates enabled and change Input date order to Day / month / year.
  3. Keep Preserve leading zeros and Trim extra spaces enabled. Leave Block unsafe formulas enabled.
  4. In Review changes, check that the date is 2025-12-31 and the name is Maya. The ID becomes ="00123" for Excel.

Repair rules update the preview automatically. There is no separate repair button.

3. Export and inspect the new file

Select Export fixed CSV. The download is semicolon-dates-fixed.csv, encoded as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark and comma separators. Viewed as text, the data is:

ID,Date,Name
"=""00123""",2025-12-31,Maya

The repeated quotes are CSV escaping. Excel evaluates the quoted text expression to display 00123. Some spreadsheet locale settings expect semicolons when opening a file directly; use the spreadsheet's text/CSV import and explicitly select a comma delimiter if needed.

Choose the right output for your destination

For a database or an importer that expects the literal identifier 00123, turn off Preserve leading zeros and configure the destination field as text. An Excel expression is not a plain identifier.

Dates such as 03/04/2025 are ambiguous. Choose the order used by the source; the tool cannot infer the intended day. Already-lost zeros and missing values cannot be recovered.

If the file does not import

An uneven row or unclosed quote needs a source correction. Follow the reported row or line, fix it in a text editor, and choose the file again. XLSX workbooks are not supported; export a CSV first. The limits are 25 MB and 100,000 data rows.

The original file is unchanged. To repeat this offline, download the standalone CSV Fixer from the tool directory, extract its ZIP, and open the HTML file locally.