copy paste list into excel separated by semi colons

The data would be incorrectly split and parsed due to that. The data I had been supplied had both colons and semicolons in cell values. Or you might even need something totally different!īut simply changing my region to something else isn’t a solution this time.

This means that in English, CSV is going to be values limited by commas, like this: Value1,Value2,Value3,Value4.īut in Finnish, for example, we’ll be using the semicolon – like so: Value1 Value2 Value3 Value4.Īnd 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. Nice and automatic – probably someone thought this to be user friendly, but instead it makes edge cases a pain. 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. So I needed to use another character – such as pipe (“|”). Additionally, I couldn’t wrap the values inside quotes due to limitations in both the export and the import functionality. 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.

Normally, that’s simple – just “save as” with a different file format. The use of the comma as a field separator (Delimiter) is the source of the name for this file format. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. What’s a “CSV” -file ? Stands for “comma-separated values” – A text file that uses a comma to separate values.Įach line of the file is a data record. Which brought me into the beautiful world of CSV delimiter configuration in Windows. xlsx file into another form, that another application could read. If you’re still here, let’s delve into the background of the issue a bit deeper.

Copy paste list into excel separated by semi colons