Microsoft Excel not presenting CSV and Excel Workbook files correctly

Copper Contributor

Hello Excel Community, I am having challenges with my Excel app. Every time I'm opening a CSV or excel workbook file the file's cell data is not being put into sperate cells it's all being put in one cell.

 

My Office is up to date so I'm not sure if it's a bug in the most recent update or what but it had been working previously. In the screenshot I've uploaded below each of the words should be in its own separate cell but that's not the case here. It is a Cambridge IGCSE source file for I.C.T and it did not come like this.

In the screenshot above each word in the spreadsheet should be in its own separate cell but that's not the case here.In the screenshot above each word in the spreadsheet should be in its own separate cell but that's not the case here.

 

 

 

Please help me if you can I'm an I.T student and i really need excel to continue with my studies 

2 Replies

@GrantTM 

When you open a CSV file, Excel should use your system's list separator to split the lines into columns.

If you happen to use comma as decimal separator, you probably use semi-colon as list separator. In that case, Excel won't split the lines automatically.

You can still use Data > Text to Columns to do that.

@Hans Vogelaar Thank you so much Hans, the text to column method works really well. I'm super grateful for the help, greatly appreciated