Importing CSV with line breaks in Excel 2007

Question

I\'m working on a feature to export search results to a CSV file to be opened in Excel. One of the fields is a free-text field, which may contain line breaks, commas, quota

Answer 1

None of the suggested solutions worked for me.

What actually works (with any encoding):

Copy/paste data from csv-file (open in Editor), then perform "text in columns" --> does not work, all right.

Go to the next tab and copy/paste again (same thing what you have got already in your clipboard) --> automagically works now.

Answer 2

Excel (at least in Office 2007 on XP) can behave differently depending on whether a CSV file is imported by opening it from the File->Open menu or by double-clicking on the file in Explorer.

I have a CSV file that is in UTF-8 encoding and contains newlines in some cells. If I open this file from Excel's File->Open menu, the "import CSV" wizard pops up and the file cannot be correctly imported: the newlines start a new row even when quoted. If I open this file by double-clicking on it in an Explorer window, then it opens correctly without the intervention of the wizard.

Answer 3

Paste into Notepad++, select Encoding > Encode in ANSI, copy all again and paste into Excel :)

Answer 4

I had a similar problem. I had some twitter data in MySQL. The data had Line feed( LF or \n) with in the data. I had a requirement of exporting the MySQL data into excel. The LF was messing up my import of csv file. So I did the following -

1. From MySQL exported to CSV with Record separator as CRLF
2. Opened the data in notepad++ 
3. Replaced CRLF (\r\n) with some string I am not expecting in the Data. I used ###~###! as replacement of CRLF
4. Replaced LF (\n) with Space
5. Replaced ###~###! with \r\n, so my record separator are back.
6. Saved and then imported into Excel

NOTE- While replacing CRLF or LF dont forget to Check Excended (\n,\r,\t... Checkbox [look at the left hand bottom of the Dialog Box)

Answer 5

This is for Excel 2016:

Just had the same problem with line breaks inside a csv file with the Excel Wizard.

Afterwards I was trying it with the "New Query" Feature: Data -> New Query -> From File -> From CSV -> Choose the File -> Import -> Load

It was working perfectly and a very quick workaround for all of you that have the same problem.

Answer 6

This worked on Mac, using csv and opening the file in Excel.

Using python to write the csv file.

data= '"first line of cell a1\r 2nd line in cell a1\r 3rd line in cell a1","cell b1","1st line in cell c1\r 2nd line in cell c1"\n"first line in cell a2"\n'

file.write(data)