CSV Encoding Fixer by Yoshinya
Opened a CSV in Excel and found rows of meaningless characters? This tool fixes that, easily. Add the file, download the copy — that is all there is to it. Everything happens inside your browser and nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to worry about, even with confidential exports.
- Free
- No sign-up
- Processed in your browser
🔒 Your files are not sent to a server. All processing happens in your browser.
① Add CSV files
Guide
How to use the tool
- Drop your CSV onto the upload area, or click to choose it.
- Press *Download the fixed file*. That is the whole process.
- Open the downloaded file in Excel. The garbled text is gone.
When is it useful?
- A CSV exported from a CMS such as Webflow opens with the Japanese turned to nonsense.
- A CSV exported from an accounting or e-commerce system is meaningless characters in Excel.
- A colleague sends a CSV that opens on their machine but not on yours.
- Something you are importing into wants UTF-8 and you cannot tell what you have.
Why does this happen?
Nothing inside a CSV records which encoding it uses, so every program has to guess. Google Sheets looks at the contents before deciding. Excel, when you double-click a .csv, does not look — it goes by your computer’s settings, which on a Japanese Windows machine means an older Japanese format. When the guess is wrong, the text comes out as nonsense. The file is not damaged, so marking it or converting it puts things right.
What this tool cannot do
A file that was saved after being read wrongly has already lost its original characters, and nothing can bring them back — ask for the export to be run again. It also does not convert to Shift_JIS.
Privacy and security
Reading and converting both happen inside your browser. There is no upload, no account, and closing the page discards everything. Because the files never leave your device, the tool can be used with customer lists and other confidential exports.
Frequently asked questions
- Are my files uploaded to a server?
- No. Everything happens in your browser. Neither the contents nor the file name is sent anywhere.
- Will this change my data?
- No. Your original file is left alone and a fixed copy is downloaded separately. The text itself is unchanged.
- Why is the downloaded file named differently?
- The copy looks identical to the original, so _utf8 is added to keep the two apart.
- My Excel file (.xlsx) is garbled. Will this fix it?
- No. An .xlsx cannot have this problem, so if one is garbled it was already broken when it was saved. It has to be produced again from the source.
- I fixed it, but Excel still will not open it.
- The file may simply be too big. A CSV of several megabytes containing long passages of text can defeat Excel whatever its encoding. Try Google Sheets, or Excel’s Data > From Text/CSV.
- How many files can I do at once?
- Up to 50 files, 50 MB each. A batch finishes almost instantly.