CSV Parsing

[Kriv]

I have several CSVs, fairly basic. The structure is as follows:

"Text"
"Text","Text","Text","Text","Text","Text"
"Text","xx","xx","xx","Text","xx"
"Text","xx","xx","xx","Text","xx"
"Text","xx","xx","xx","Text","xx"
"Text","xx","xx","xx","Text","xx"

On practically every PC, if I double click the CSVs in explorer, excel opens up and parses the data correctly, putting the contents as you'd expect, into separate cells.

On one PC this does not happen, all the data appears in Column A. I suspect that Excel is attempting to open the document an parsing with fixed width rather than delimited.

So far I have tried:
- Detect and repair, to which this has made no difference.
- Renaming the csv to txt opens up the import wizard.
- Using Data > Text to columns will work as a workaround, but not an overall solution.

I really want to avoid a reinstall as this seems way OTT for something so simple. Is there a setting in Excel or a reg hack to force excel to parse the file as delimited?

Ver: Excel 2003, 11.6560.6568 SP2

 

[Richard Schollar]

Hi

One thing that can do this (and I'm not at all confident that this is necessarily the case in your example) is the regional settings list separator (in Windows). If it is set to something other than "," then the csv will be opened up and not parsed.

Check via (on XP) Start>Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Regional Options>Customize and check the List Separator box.

 

[Kriv]

Richard,

You Sir are a legend. That has fixed it a treat. It always amazes me that something so simple to fix can be found in the most illogical of places.