Common CSV Import Errors and How to Fix Them

"Columns are misaligned / data is in the wrong column"

Likely cause: an unescaped delimiter inside a value shifted everything after it over by one column.

Fix: check whether text fields containing commas (or your delimiter) are properly wrapped in double quotes. See our CSV best practices guide for the quoting rules.

"Weird symbols instead of accented characters"

Likely cause: an encoding mismatch, the file was saved in one character encoding and read as another.

Fix: see our dedicated guide to CSV encoding issues, re-decode with the correct source encoding, then save as UTF-8.

"The row count doesn't match what I expected"

Likely causes:

• A join used earlier in the pipeline was an inner join, silently dropping unmatched rows
• A filter excluded more rows than intended, check the exact filter condition
• Trailing blank rows at the end of the file are being counted, or not, inconsistently between tools
• A multi-line value (a field containing a literal newline inside quotes) was split into two rows by a tool that doesn't handle quoted newlines correctly

"A numeric column imported as text" (or vice versa)

Likely cause: one or more rows in that column contain a non-numeric value, a stray currency symbol, a "N/A" placeholder, or extra whitespace, forcing the whole column to be treated as text.

Fix: scan the column for the first non-numeric value rather than assuming it's uniform, one bad row is often enough to break type detection for the entire column.

"Dates imported as the wrong day/month"

Likely cause: an ambiguous date format (like 01/02/2024) got interpreted with the wrong locale assumption. See our date formatting guide for the fix.

"The file won't open / import tool rejects it immediately"

Likely causes:

• The file isn't actually CSV despite the extension, sometimes an Excel file is renamed to .csv without converting it
• The delimiter doesn't match what the tool expects (semicolon vs comma is common with European exports)
• The file has a corrupted or unexpected line ending format

Doing This in How To CSV

The Auto Fix tool diagnoses and repairs the most common structural issues (encoding, delimiters, ragged rows) automatically, and Data Health Check surfaces type mismatches and inconsistencies across a file before you try importing it anywhere else.