Change delimiter for csv in excel

Although CSV stands for comma-separated values, it has become a common file type to define simple text files including delimiter-separated data. Thus, a CSV file can use a semicolon or tab character as a delimiter as well. In this guide, we’re going to show you how to change CSV delimiter in Excel.

Changing the delimiter in Excel Options

The first approach in our article is about changing how Excel evaluates CSV files including saving. You can make Excel using semicolon (;) as the delimiter.

1. Open Advanced Options by following File > Options > Advanced.
2. In the Editing options section, find Use system operators
3. Uncheck it to override the system settings.
4. Set Decimal separator to comma (,) and Thousands separator to period (.).
5. Clicking OK ensures that Excel uses semicolon (;) as the delimiter.
   

This setting allows Excel to save CSV files with semicolons (;).

Changing the CSV delimiter when importing files

Excel also allows you to change the delimiter while opening files. This is a more convenient way if you do not want to alter Excel’s entire behavior. Because Excel’s data import features have been updated vastly beginning with 2016, we divided this section into two parts.

Power Query — Excel 2016 and newer

Power Query allows you to choose the delimiter when creating a connection. You can find the option in the Preview dialog. You can create the connection by using From Text/CSV command in Data > Get & Transform Data.

Selecting the file opens the Preview window. Probably, the Power Query guessed the delimiter correctly. However, you can change CSV delimiter easily at a dropdown option.

Use Load or Transform Data buttons to load the data directly into your workbook or modify it in the Power Query window respectively.

Excel 2013 or older

If you are using Excel 2013 or a previous version without the Power Query add-in, you can use Text Import Wizard which shares a similar user interface with Text to Columns wizard.

1. Click Data > Get External Data > From Text to select a file and open the Text Import Wizard.
2. In the first step of the wizard, make sure to select Delimited
3. Click Next button to continue.
   
4. Select one or more delimiters that fits your data. You can see if the data is separated correctly in the Data preview section.
   
5. You can modify data types for columns at the next step. Click Next to continue the third step or click the Finish button to populate the separated data in your worksheet.

I don’t see an option immediately in Excel, but I can offer some advice.

Remember that CSV files are Comma Separated Values, which follows a standard: Data, a comma, data, a comma, etc. To break this means it will not follow the specification.

What happens if you have a comma in your data though? Excel will automatically surround that cell’s content with quotation marks ("), so the program importing the file will know when that cell actually ends.

If you do not want a comma as a separator, you can save the file as a CSV still, then edit it manually. Open a text editor like Notepad or Notepad++. Do a search for whatever character you want to use (i.e. in Notepad, go to Edit->Find). If you want a pipe, search for a pipe (|). If you hit any results, do not use this character. To search for a tab easily, I’d recommend using Notepad++.

Once you find that the character you want to use isn’t being used elsewhere in your document, then you can do a Search and Replace. In Notepad, go to Edit->Replace…. In ‘Find what:’, type a comma. In ‘Replace with:’, type the character you want to use for the separator. The next part is to hit Find Next. The reason for this, is that if there are commas in your data as well, this will break your file. Only replace the commas that are delimiters of the data, and nothing in quotation marks.

Once this is done, you can save the file. If you want to import it, I’d recommend renaming it to a .TXT file, so Excel will ask you what the Field Delimiter Character is. If you choose to open a .CSV file, it will automatically use a comma as the delimiter, which is what you don’t want.

This post was most recently updated on March 13th, 2023.

6 min read.

This article will explain how you can change the Excel list delimiter for your CSV (or other) file exports. Because it isn’t always a comma. And setting the delimiter won’t escape or strip the same characters in the values, so it’ll mess up your data quite easily.

Background

If you’re still here, let’s delve into the background of the issue a bit deeper.

I needed to wrangle data stored in a .xlsx file into another form, that another application could read. This file format happened to be CSV. Which brought me into the beautiful world of CSV delimiter configuration in Windows.

What’s a “CSV” -file ?

Stands for “comma-separated values” – A text file that uses a comma to separate values.

Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separator (Delimiter) is the source of the name for this file format.

Normally, that’s simple – just “save as” with a different file format. However, this time I was posed with an issue: the data included both commas (“,”) and semicolons (“;”), both of which are typical delimiters in CSV files. Additionally, I couldn’t wrap the values inside quotes due to limitations in both the export and the import functionality. So I needed to use another character – such as pipe (“|”).

Instead of being able to configure the delimiter in the export (like in any sensible spreadsheet editor, if you ask me!), Excel is just going to use your regional settings and grab the list separator from there. Nice and automatic – probably someone thought this to be user friendly, but instead it makes edge cases a pain.

This means that in English, CSV is going to be values limited by commas, like this:

Value1,Value2,Value3,Value4...

But in Finnish, for example, we’ll be using the semicolon – like so:

Value1;Value2;Value3;Value4...

And I could imagine there are plenty of other locales where you might need to tell the values apart with a semicolon instead of a comma. Or you might even need something totally different!

But simply changing my region to something else isn’t a solution this time. The data I had been supplied had both colons and semicolons in cell values. The data would be incorrectly split and parsed due to that.

However, we can luckily override the delimiter to be almost anything – and it’s all done through the regional settings. Read on to see for yourself!

Solution

So, I started googling. And naturally, I found a couple of examples on how to save a csv file with a different delimiter in Windows 7… Obviously, that’ll help you eventually find your way in Windows 10 or Windows 11 as well, even though the user interfaces are a bit different. But I thought it’s always useful to also document the exact steps!

The guide below should be accurate for Windows 10 and 11, and be “close enough” for Windows 7.

Here are the steps for saving a csv in Excel with a different delimiter, in writing – and see some useful screenshots further below!

So now you know how to save (or export, if you prefer that term) a CSV file with a custom delimiter (anything different than a comma or semicolon, depending on your machine configuration) in Microsoft Office Excel on Windows. If you run into any questions, drop them in the comments-section below!

As an interesting side note, you can use completely nonsensical characters as delimiters! Take the picture below as an example – I actually needed this delimiter for a work project once. A project, that’s probably still running in production…

References

Big kudos to Barry Stevens for his blog post on the topic! And also to Sami Laiho, for noticing you can’t use the same character as both decimal and list separator 😬..

Solution

1. Make sure Microsoft Excel is closed before trying to change the CSV delimiter.
2. Open Control Panel.
3. Next, you need to access Regional Settings.
4. Click the “Additional Settings” -button.
5. Find the “List separator” and change it to your preferred delimiter such as a pipe (“|”).

How do I change my delimiter?

In Microsoft Windows, click the Start button, and then click Control Panel. Open the dialog box for changing Regional and Language settings. In the dialog box, look for the List separator setting. (Location may vary based on Windows version.

Can a CSV have a different delimiter?

Although the file is defined as Comma Separated Values, the delimiter could be anything. The most common delimiters are: a comma (,), a semicolon (;), a tab (t), a space ( ) and a pipe (|). But theoretically anything can be a delimiter as long as it is consistent.

How do I change a semicolon to a CSV delimiter?

To use notepad or set the default list separator symbol in the Regional Settings

1. Right click on the file.
2. Click the Edit menu.
3. Enter a semicolon ‘;’ into the Find what box.
4. Enter a comma ‘,’ into the Replace with box.
5. Click the Replace all button.
6. Close the Replace window.
7. Save the file as a .

How do I change delimiters in Excel?

1 Answer

1. Do Data -> Text to Columns.
2. Make sure to choose Delimited.
3. Click Next >
4. Enable the Tab delimiter, disable all the others.
5. Clear Treat consecutive delimiters as one.
6. Click Cancel.

How do I change a CSV file to delimiter in Excel?

Mac/Windows

1. Open a new Excel sheet.
2. Click the Data tab, then From Text.
3. Select the CSV file that has the data clustered into one column.
4. Select Delimited, then make sure the File Origin is Unicode UTF-8.
5. Select Comma (this is Affinity’s default list separator).
6. Finally, click Finish.
7. Remember to Save your document!

How do I change a delimiter to a csv file in Python?

How to change the delimiter in a CSV file

1. Create a new Python file in the location where your CSV file is saved.
2. Open up an Anaconda Prompt instance.
3. Type python change_delimiter.py (replacing change_delimiter.py with the name of your Python file) then press Enter.

What is a delimiter in CSV?

Answer: A tab-delimited or comma-separated value (CSV) file are text format files.with a character such as a comma (,). This character is called the field separator or delimiter. When the field separator (delimiter) is a comma, the file is in comma-separated (CSV) or comma-delimited format.

How do you change a Semicoter to a delimiter in Excel?

To achieve the desired result we need to temporary change the delimiter setting in the Excel Options. Uncheck the “Use system separators” setting and put a comma in the “Decimal Separator” field. Now save the file in the . CSV format and it will be saved in the semicolon delimited format !!!

How do I put commas in a CSV file?

The encoded values will never contain a comma so every comma in your CSV will be a separator. You can use the Text_Qualifier field in your Flat file connection manager to as ” . This should wrap your data in quotes and only separate by commas which are outside the quotes.

What is a colon delimited format?

Delimited formats
Any character may be used to separate the values, but the most common delimiters are the comma, tab, and colon.This prevents the comma in the actual field value (Bloggs, Fred; Doe, Jane, etc.) from being interpreted as a field separator.

What are delimiters in Excel?

A delimiter is the symbol or space which separates the data you wish to split. For example, if your column reads “Smith, John” you would select “Comma” as your delimiter. Select the delimiter within your data. Check the box next to “Treat consecutive delimiters as one.” Click [Next].

How do I set text qualifier in CSV?

Click on Export icon > Export Data to CSV and the Save as CSV Options box opens. Set the Text qualifier as either double or single quotes. Set the Column delimiter as a comma. Click OK.

How do I edit a CSV file in Excel?

Open an CSV file using the Text Import Wizard

1. In Windows Explorer, rename the CSV file with a TXT file extension. For example, rename Import.
2. in Excel, open the import file. Select File > Open, and browse to your file.
3. The Text Import Wizard is displayed.
4. Your file will be opened in Excel.

How do I convert text to delimiter in Excel?

If you’re using Microsoft Excel:

1. Open the File menu and select the Save as… command.
2. In the Save as type drop-down box, select the Text (tab delimited) (*. txt) option.
3. Select the Save button. If you see warning messages pop up, select the OK or Yes button.

How do you change the delimiter in Python?

Given List of Strings and replacing delimiter, replace current delimiter in each string.

1. Input : test_list = [“a, t”, “g, f, g”, “w, e”, “d, o”], repl_delim = ‘ ‘
2. Output : [“a t”, “g f g”, “w e”, “d o”]
3. Explanation : comma is replaced by empty spaces at each string.

How do you set a separator in Python?

The separator between the arguments to print() function in Python is space by default (softspace feature) , which can be modified and can be made to any character, integer or string as per our choice. The ‘sep’ parameter is used to achieve the same, it is found only in python 3. x or later.

How do I use delimiter in Python?

Split strings in Python (delimiter, line break, regex, etc.)

1. Split by delimiter: split() Specify the delimiter: sep.
2. Split from right by delimiter: rsplit()
3. Split by line break: splitlines()
4. Split by regular expression: re.split()
5. Concatenate list of strings.
6. Split based on the number of characters: slice.

How do I change the delimiter in a text file?

You can change the separator character that is used in both delimited and . csv text files.
Change the default list separator for saving files as text (. csv) in Excel

1. Clear Excel Options > Advanced > Editing options > Use system separators.
2. Set Decimal separator to , (a comma).
3. Set Thousands separator to . (a period).

How does CSV determine delimiter?

Here’s what I do.

1. Parse the first 5 lines of a CSV file.
2. Count the number of delimiters [commas, tabs, semicolons and colons] in each line.
3. Compare the number of delimiters in each line. If you have a properly formatted CSV, then one of the delimiter counts will match in each row.

Where should you add a delimiter?

When designing a data file format, use delimiters that will not appear in the data or padding, or use CSV or SSV forms. When copying from a table into a file, you can insert delimiters independently of columns. For example, to insert a newline character at the end of a line, specify nl=d1 at the end of the column list.