Change separators in excel

Change the semicolon to a comma or vice versa

If you need to change the separator in Excel without changing system options, please see Change the decimal point to a comma or vice versa.

To change system settings, do the following:

1. Open Control Panel.

2. In the Control Panel dialog box, choose Change date, time, or number formats:

3. In the Region dialog box, choose Additional settings. :

4. In the Customize Format dialog box, choose appropriate List separator or enter the new one:

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How to change decimal separator in excel

my excel 2013 uses a comma («,») to separate decimals in a number. How can I format it that it uses a dot («.») to separate the decimals?

1 Answer 1

There are two ways to do this:

First of all, excel may be using the system default decimal separator. You can change this one in the region and language settings, which is found in the control panel.

The second option is to tell excel not to use the system-wide value and specify them yourself. You find the relevant setting for this under [file] [options][advanced]

And here are the screenshots for doing it via region and language. Note that this may affect more programs than just excel. This might be desirable to get a consistent setup, or it may disturb some other fragile setup.

IGNORE THE YELLOW IN THE LAST SCREENSHOT
I do not have excel 2013 at home (I use openoffice). These were screenshots taken a few weeks ago when I needed to explain something similar involving the list separator. For your question use the digit grouping symbol.

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Change the decimal point to a comma or vice versa

If you simply need to replace comma to point, dot to comma, semicolon to comma, etc. in the Excel spreadsheet, check How to change comma to decimal point and vice versa in Excel.

To change Excel options for decimal separators, do the following:

1. On the File tab, click the Options button:

2. In the Excel Options dialog box, on the Advanced tab, clean the Use system separators checkbox:

3. In the appropriate fields, enter symbols you need for Decimal separator and for Thousands separator.

Note: Changing dot to the comma in the Decimal separator field also requires changes in the Thousands separator field. You can’t use a comma for both fields.

The English-speaking countries like the U.S., the U.K, and Australia decimal separators are different from the European countries’ decimal delimiters. The first ones use period, point, or dot as a decimal separator (17.96) and comma as a thousand groups delimiter (1,017.96). Others use the comma as a decimal separator (17,96) and quotation as a thousand groups delimiter (1’017,96). By default, Excel gets separator settings from Windows, and changing the Windows settings can break other applications, but advanced Excel options allow you to override the Windows settings.

Decimal separator settings are not specific for the current workbook and change number formats in all workbooks you open.

If you need to change system options, please see Change the semicolon to a comma or vice versa tip, which explains how to modify list separator in the Customize Format dialog in the system. The same dialog controls the Decimal symbol and the Digit grouping symbol settings.

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How to change comma to decimal point and vice versa in Excel

Import a structured text file to an Excel spreadsheet

Import a text file to an Excel spreadsheet

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Change Thousands & Decimal Separators in Excel, PowerPoint and ThinkCell

Sometimes you don’t want the comma “,” as a thousands separator, but rather a full stop “.”. Or you don’t want the full stop as the decimal separator. Changing these two separators in Office is easy: You can either do it system-wide or override the system settings.

Change the separators under Windows

The two separators for decimals and thousand are connected in many language regions: If you change the thousands separator, e.g. from comma to full stop, you also need to change the decimal separator. Because these two things are connected, you usually change both in the same place.

In Excel, you have two choices: Either modify the thousands and decimal delimiter system-wide or just do it within Excel. Recommendation: Do it system-wide, if you want to change them permanently or also need to do it for PowerPoint. If you just temporarily, simply override them in the Excel options.

Please note: Don’t search within the language and proofing menus. You won’t find it there.

Change the separators in Excel, permanently and system-wide

By default, Excel uses the separators defined by your Region settings in Windows. If you permanently and for the whole computer want to change them, follow these steps:

1. Press the Windows key. The Start menu should open.
2. Type “Region”.
3. If the small symbol with a clock and a globe comes up, click on it (see the animation on the right hand side).
4. You can either change the whole region or just the separators. For only changing the separators, click on “Additional settings…”.
5. Type your “Decimal symbol” and “Digit grouping symbol” in the corresponding text fields.
6. Confirm with OK.

If the steps 1 and 2 above don’t work, you can also navigate through the control panel. Therefore, right click on the start button and click on “Control Panel”. If your control panel is organized by category, switch to “Small icon” on the top right corner. Click on “Region” and continue with step 3 above.

Please note 1: Usually the new settings adapt immediately. But sometimes, you have to press F9 in order to recalculate. If it’s still not working, try restarting Excel.

Please note 2: If the GIF is too fast, please refer to the steps shown on the screenshot on the right hand side.

Change the separators in Excel, temporarily and inside Excel

Besides the system settings, you can modify the thousands and decimal separators within Excel. Recommendation: Override them only if you temporarily need to change them.

1. Go to “File” and click on “Options” on the left side.
2. Within the Excel options, click on “Advanced” on the left side.
3. Remove the tick mark from “Use system separators”. Now you can define your own for decimals and thousands. Confirm with OK.

Change the separators in PowerPoint

PowerPoint uses the separators defined in your language region like Excel. Changing them requires the same steps as described above in the chapter Change the separators in Excel, permanently and system-wide.

Please note: Usually you need to restart PowerPoint in order to let the changes take effect.

Change the them in Think-Cell

Think-Cell is a great add-in for PowerPoint. You can easily create charts with much more comfort than the built-in chart options. Unfortunately, some settings are a little bit hidden in Think-Cell.

If you want to change the thousands and decimal separators in Think-Cell, follow these steps:

1. Select the labels you want to change. If you want to change it for all labels, click on the label in the left bottom corner first (here: 12,900), hold the Shift key and click on the label in the top right corner (here: 46,400).
2. The small window opens for modifying the labels (e.g. font, separators). Click into the second item (a text box). Now you can change the separators, either from the list or change it to “Use Excel Format”.

1. If you choose “Use Excel Format”, you can further define the label number format. Therefore, open the datasheet, either by double clicking onto your chart or by clicking on the small sheet icon in the right bottom corner.
2. Once the datasheet is open, select the cells you want to format and press Ctrl + 1 on the keyboard.
3. Now you can finetune the number format of your think-cell chart.

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Change them in Mac OS

If you use a Mac, the approach is similar to Windows. Change the separator within the system settings. The only difference: Excel for Mac doesn’t allow you to override the system settings (temporarily).

1. Open the “System Preferences” and click on “Language & Region”.
2. Click on “Advanced” on the bottom of the Window.
3. Define your desired separators under “Number separators”.

Please note: Usually you need to restart Excel in order to see the effect.

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How to change Excel CSV delimiter to comma or semicolon

by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on March 9, 2023

The tutorial shows how to change CSV separator when importing or exporting data to/from Excel, so you can save your file in the comma-separated values or semicolon-separated values format.

Excel is diligent. Excel is smart. It thoroughly examines the system settings of the machine it’s running on and does its best to anticipate the user’s needs … quite often to disappointing results.

Imagine this: you want to export your Excel data to another application, so you go save it in the CSV format supported by many programs. Whatever CSV option you use, the result is a semicolon-delimited file instead of comma-separated you really wanted. The setting is default, and you have no idea how to change it. Don’t give up! No matter how deep the setting is hidden, we’ll show you a way to locate it and tweak for your needs.

What delimiter Excel uses for CSV files

To handle .csv files, Microsoft Excel uses the List separator defined in Windows Regional settings.

In North America and some other countries, the default list separator is a comma, so you get CSV comma delimited.

In European countries, a comma is reserved for the decimal symbol, and the list separator is generally set to semicolon. That is why the result is CSV semicolon delimited.

To get a CSV file with another field delimiter, apply one of the approaches described below.

Change separator when saving Excel file as CSV

When your save a workbook as a .csv file, Excel separates values with your default List separator. To force it to use a different delimiter, proceed with the following steps:

1. Click File >Options >Advanced.
2. Under Editing options, clear the Use system separators check box.
3. Change the default Decimal separator. As this will change the way decimal numbers are displayed in your worksheets, choose a different Thousands separator to avoid confusion.

Depending on which separator you wish to use, configure the settings in one of the following ways.

To convert Excel file to CSV semicolon delimited, set the default decimal separator to a comma. This will get Excel to use a semicolon for the List separator (CSV delimiter):

• Set Decimal separator to comma (,)
• Set Thousands separator to period (.)
  

To save Excel file as CSV comma delimited, set the decimal separator to a period (dot). This will make Excel use a comma for the List separator (CSV delimiter):

• Set Decimal separator to period (.)
• Set Thousands separator to comma (,)
  

If you want to change a CSV separator only for a specific file, then tick the Use system settings check box again after exporting your Excel workbook to CSV.

Note. Obviously, the changes you’ve made in Excel Options are limited to Excel. Other applications will keep using the default List separator defined in your Windows Regional settings.

Change delimiter when importing CSV to Excel

There are a few different ways to import CSV file into Excel. The way of changing the delimiter depends on the importing method you opted for.

Indicate separator directly in CSV file

For Excel to be able to read a CSV file with a field separator used in a given CSV file, you can specify the separator directly in that file. For this, open your file in any text editor, say Notepad, and type the below string before any other data:

• To separate values with comma: sep=,
• To separate values with semicolon: sep=;
• To separate values with a pipe: sep=|

In a similar fashion, you can use any other character for the delimiter — just type the character after the equality sign.

Once the delimiter is defined, you can open your text file in Excel like you normally would, from Excel itself or from Windows Explorer.

For example, to correctly open a semicolon delimited CSV in Excel, we explicitly indicate that the field separator is a semicolon:

Choose delimiter in Text Import Wizard

Another way to handle a csv file with a delimiter different from the default one is to import the file rather than open. In Excel 2013 an earlier, that was quite easy to do with the Text Import Wizard residing on the Data tab, in the Get External Data group. Beginning with Excel 2016, the wizard is removed from the ribbon as a legacy feature. However, you can still make use of it:

• Enable From Text (Legacy) feature.
• Change the file extension from .csv to .txt, and then open the txt file from Excel. This will launch the Import Text Wizard automatically.

In step 2 of the wizard, you are suggested to choose from the predefined delimiters (tab, comma, semicolon, or space) or specify your custom one:

Specify delimiter when creating a Power Query connection

Microsoft Excel 2016 and higher provides one more easy way to import a csv file — by connecting to it with the help of Power Query. When creating a Power Query connection, you can choose the delimiter in the Preview dialog window:

Change default CSV separator globally

To change the default List separator not only for Excel but for all programs installed on your computer, here’s what you need to do:

On Windows, go to Control Panel >Region settings. For this, just type Region in the Windows search box, and then click Region settings.

In the Region panel, under Related settings, click Additional date, time, and regional settings.

Under Region, click Change date, time, or number formats.

In the Region dialog box, on the Formats tab, click Additional settings…

In the Customize Format dialog box, on the Numbers tab, type the character you want to use as the default CSV delimiter in the List separator box.

For this change to work, the List separatorshould not be the same as Decimal symbol.

Click OK twice to close both dialog boxes.

When done, restart Excel, so it can pick up your changes.

• Modifying the system settings will cause a global change on your computer that will affect all applications and all output of the system. Do not do this unless you are 100% confident in the results.
• If changing the separator has adversely affected the behavior of some application or caused other troubles on your machine, undo the changes. For this, click the Reset button in the Customize Format dialog box (step 5 above). This will remove all the customizations you’ve made and restore the system default settings.

Changing List separator: background and consequences

Before changing the List separator on your machine, I encourage you to carefully read this section, so you fully understand possible outcomes.

First off, it should be noted that depending on the country Windows uses different default separators. It’s because large numbers and decimals are written in different ways across the globe.

In the USA, UK and some other English-speaking countries including Australia and New Zealand, the following separators are used:

Decimal symbol: dot (.)

Digit grouping symbol: comma (,)

List separator: comma (,)

In most European countries, the default list separator is a semicolon (;) because a comma is utilized as the decimal point:

Decimal symbol: comma (,)

Digit grouping symbol: dot (.)

List separator: semicolon (;)

For example, here’s how two thousand dollars and fifty cents is written in different countries:

US and UK: $2,000.50

How does all this relate to the CSV delimiter? The point is that the List separator (CSV delimiter) and Decimal symbol should be two different characters. That means setting the List separator to comma will require changing the default Decimal symbol (if it’s set to comma). As the result, numbers will be displayed in a different way in all your applications.

Moreover, List separator is used for separating arguments in Excel formulas. Once you change it, say from comma to semicolon, the separators in all your formulas will also change to semicolons.

If you are not ready for such large-scale modifications, then change a separator only for a specific CSV file as described in the first part of this tutorial.

That’s how you can open or save CSV files with different delimiters in Excel. Thank you for reading and see you next week!

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Table of contents

This is the most recent post on that topic I could find, which tells me, that this problem has still not been SUSTAINABLY resolved by the «software giant» (as one said here) Microsoft .
The only sustainable way to resolve it — and not the whole world is the United States of America, so we DO NEED such a resolution — would be a seamlessly added EXPORT filter, allowing to replace the the decimal and field separators of the csv saved by Excel .
Actually this could also be achieved — as a workaround — by a well-crafted VBA macro.
But we DO NEED this as a built-in function of Excel and this can only be done by Microsoft as the manufacturer of their (international . ) Office suite, right ?
Remark:
When writing such a macro (as a workaround), you would not only have to replace , and ;
Be aware that the csv specification also allows the use of of the separator WITHIN a field, when using special delimiters, like that:
. , «This is a text, aint it», 64.7, .
So you would have to take care of such «exceptions», otherwise you’d spoil the whole csv.
Anyway thanks to all, contributing ideas to this thread, including Svetlana for describing all EXISTING workarounds (which are only a crutch in my opinion; sorry Svetlana, that’s not your fault of course !)

FINALLY.
Would anyone of you know where to request such a «feature» at Microsoft directly ?
Any developers forum we could jointly add such a request and could gather others, who hopefully agree with us and demand such a priority change with their next release ?

This is rediculous. How can a BIG software giant as Microsoft think in this way!?
Let us set the separator manually.

If you look at some other software that import/export CSV they use comma as separator and put all the information within quotes. If there is a quote in the information it is escaped.

I guess there’s some old standard from 1965 stating how a CSV should be. 🙁

Hi all, Svetlana is not true at all, but only partially. I will explain.

If you use English locale and you in Excel change decimal separator from system to comma, Excel understand that he cannot use comma as a field delimiter and will use semicolon instead of it and will save csv file in non-english format, it is for example: 1,5;23,45.

But, in the case you are working with for example Czech locale (or probably with French locale) and you in Excel change a decimal separator to dot as correct for English csv and save this file. The format of file is for example: 1.5;23;45 and not expected 1.5,23.45. The reason is, I guess, that Excel has no any reason to change a field separator from semicolon to comma, because semicolon is a correct field separator for csv file and and does not contradict with the dot or comma decimal delimiter at all.

So with English locale you can save an usual non-english csv with comma decimal delimiter and semicolon field separator, but with non-english locale (Czech or French) you cannot save usual English csv, with dot decimal delimiter and comma field separator, but you can save alternative English csv, with dot decimal delimiter and semicolon field separator.

Of course another possibility is to switch locale with other possible problems, for example with other application.

Best regards,
Martin Molhanec

All works as intended. Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise.
Decimal and Thousands separators can be changed in my case — just mind the emtpy space character that you HAVE to delete!

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3. 6.];True

Please need to make a code or tools to be three above details as a column, its mean [ ] [ ] True as a three columns

This instruction doesn’t work:
«To save Excel file as CSV comma delimited, set the decimal separator to a period (dot). This will make Excel use a comma for the List separator (CSV delimiter):»

I’ve just retested it in my Excel 365 — it does work as described. What Excel version do you use?

I had the same problem, could not change the list separator modifying it in Excel 2016 Professional. The file I was trying to convert, had to be used in another program that uses the comma as list separator (forScore).
I confirm the second option, the global change of the list separator. This has the draw-back that it interferes with other simulating programs. So, after converting the file, I had to restore the configuration for my other simulators to work properly again.

How did you test the first approach?

Here’s what I did:

— Performed the steps described in «Change separator when saving Excel file as CSV». In particular, set Decimal separator to period (.) and Thousands separator to comma (,).
— Saved the workbook as CSV file.
— Opened the CSV file in Notepad to check which separator is actually used. In my case, the result is always comma-separated values.

Same story for me.
And i am not allowed to change global setting by company policy, so no alternative there.

Hi Svetlana,
for me with Excel 365 it is not working.
Allthough doing all steps and chekcing it twice, result is still semicolon separataed.

The semicolon is still there since perhaps you have missed this part «For this change to work, the List separator should not be the same as Decimal symbol.» on the article.

If all above do not work and you want to properly read/modify csv which source file has comma as separator and dot as delimiter just open it in an editor, I used vsc for example. Mark all commas in the file, change them to semicolons after that mark all dots if you have numbers and change them to commas.

Office 365, version 2108. comma delimited doesn’t work for me as well. All done with the description from this article.
Microsoft it’s shame we cannot do it Excel :/

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