Fix Garbled Characters (£, €, é) When Opening a Bank CSV in Excel

You download a bank CSV and open it in Excel, but a merchant called "Café Lumière" appears with odd symbols in place of the accents, or a pound or euro sign is replaced by unrelated characters. The characters in the file are usually fine. The problem is that a CSV file is plain text, and Excel has to decide which character set to use to read it. If it picks a different one from the one used to write the file, the letters come out wrong.

Microsoft's documentation for the Text Import Wizard describes the setting that controls this, called File origin, as the character set that is used in the text file. The page says that in most cases you can leave it at the default, and that you should change it when you know the file was created with a different character set from the one your computer uses.

Microsoft's help for importing text files says that when you open a .csv file in Excel it opens directly in a new workbook, and that Excel applies its current default data format settings to the columns. That means no import dialog appears in which you could choose a character set. To get a choice, import the file instead of double-clicking it.

Microsoft documents an import route for newer versions of Excel. On the Data tab, select Get Data, then From File, then From Text/CSV. Browse to the CSV file. Microsoft's Azure Cost Management guide, which addresses exactly this problem for garbled exports, then says to set File origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and select Load. Microsoft's Partner Center guide gives matching steps and adds that you can alternatively use a specific Unicode code page identifier for your language, and that you should set the Delimiter to Comma.

In summary, the steps those pages list are:

Microsoft's Partner Center guide gives one explicit warning for files with non-English characters: do not convert the .csv file to the Excel file format (.xlsx) first, because the conversion can cause data loss or garbled output. Import the CSV with the correct File origin instead of opening it, saving it and hoping the symbols recover.

One limit worth knowing. Changing File origin can only decode characters that are actually in the file. If the symbols were already damaged when the CSV was written or re-saved by another program, no import setting can restore them. In that case go back to the original download or the original statement.

After loading, scan the description column for the accented names and the amount column for currency symbols. Look at a few rows against the source statement. If the data starts life in a PDF, PDFtoRow converts bank statement PDFs to Excel or CSV and shows a free preview of the first 10 rows, so you can check the characters before downloading.