How to Fix Garbled Characters in a CSV File
Garbled CSV characters usually happen when a file was saved in one encoding but opened as another. For example, UTF-8, Windows-1252, or ISO-8859-1 text may be interpreted incorrectly by the spreadsheet app.
Got a CSV and don’t know what is wrong?
Whether it is a supplier CSV not in the right format, a sales list CSV cleanup, a customer list CSV precheck, a bank export, or a spreadsheet that opens wrong, Argon checks common issues locally in your browser.
Start with plain English: weird characters, everything opens in one column, Excel changed my product codes, rows look uneven, leading zeros disappeared, or I got a CSV and don’t know what to do.
open the local CSV repair toolWhy CSV characters become garbled
Names and accents can turn into strange characters when an app guesses the wrong encoding. You might see examples such as René instead of René, São Paulo instead of São Paulo, or stray  characters.
Older business export systems may use Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8.
Manual fix in Excel
Use Data > From Text/CSV instead of double-clicking. Try UTF-8, Windows-1252, or Western European encodings if Excel offers a File Origin selector. Review the preview before loading.
Manual fix in Google Sheets
Google Sheets handles UTF-8 well, but legacy encodings may still appear garbled. If the preview is still wrong, the file may need encoding repair before import.
Check the CSV after cleaning characters
Argon can repair common encoding issues and flag common Excel-risk values locally in your browser. Your CSV contents are not uploaded.
Open CSV Precheck ToolWhy a clean CSV may still need a precheck
Encoding repair can solve character issues, but Excel can still change IDs, product codes, dates, and leading zeros if the CSV is opened directly.
Use the CSV Precheck Report to review Excel-risk values after cleaning characters, especially long IDs, ZIP codes, tracking numbers, and scientific-notation-like product codes.
Related guides
Argon flags common encoding and CSV structure issues for review. It does not guarantee that every corrupted file can be recovered.