Changing regional setting (CSV imports)

Some European spreadsheet programs use semicolons rather than commas to separate (delimit) data fields in CSV files (as commas may be used to represent decimal places for currencies). This can cause problems with CSV imports.

There are two ways to remove semicolons quickly:

  • Open your file with a text editor, and perform a find and replace search to replace the semicolons with commas.
  • Another way is to change your regional settings temporarily.

Instructions

This article explains how you would make this change for Excel (Windows 8/10).

  1. Close Excel.
  2. From the Start menu, navigate to the Control Panel and then the Region option (in Windows 8, it's called Region and Language Options).
  3. Click Additional Settings.
  4. In the Decimal Symbol field, enter a period (.).
  5. In the List Separator field, enter a comma (,).
  6. Save the changes.

After that's done, you need to open the spreadsheet and save it in CSV format with UTF-8 encoding.

NOTE  If using an alternative spreadsheet program, please consult your program’s documentation for further instructions on changing the regional settings.