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Bank CSV shows garbled characters in Excel: how to fix it

· 4 min read

You open a bank CSV in Excel and the descriptions are full of odd characters: "£12.50" instead of "£12.50", "Café" instead of "Café", "Joe’s" instead of "Joe's". The transactions are fine. Excel has read the file in the wrong character encoding.

What's going on

A CSV is plain text, and there's more than one way to store characters like £, é and curly apostrophes as bytes. Most banks now export in UTF-8, which stores each of those as two or three bytes. If Excel assumes the file uses an older encoding such as Windows-1252, it shows each of those bytes as a separate character, which is where "£" and "é" come from.

The reverse happens too. If a file really is in an older encoding and gets read as UTF-8, the same characters turn into a "�" symbol.

You seeIt should be
壣
€€
éé
’’ (curly apostrophe)
�A character from an older encoding, read as UTF-8

Fix it in Excel for Windows

Don't double-click the CSV. Import it instead, which lets you choose the encoding:

  1. Open a blank workbook.
  2. Go to Data → From Text/CSV and choose the file.
  3. In the preview, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8). The preview updates straight away, so you can see the characters come right.
  4. Click Load.

If the preview looks worse in UTF-8, the file uses an older encoding. Try 1252: Western European (Windows) instead.

Fix it in Excel for Mac

  1. Go to File → Import, choose CSV file and select the file.
  2. In the Text Import Wizard, set File origin to Unicode (UTF-8).
  3. Choose Comma as the delimiter and finish the import.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets reads UTF-8 files correctly, so importing the CSV there (File → Import → Upload) usually shows the right characters. You can then download it as an Excel file if you need one.

Don't fix it by hand

Replacing "£" with "£" works until you hit a character you didn't think of, and then the descriptions no longer match the statement. Re-importing with the right encoding fixes every character at once.

Files that open correctly first time

A UTF-8 CSV that starts with a short marker called a byte-order mark opens correctly when you double-click it in Excel. CSVs from statement2sheets include that marker, so accents and currency symbols come through intact. That applies to the statement converter and to the plain CSV export of the OFX viewer.

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