If you process CSV files exported from your online store with Microsoft Excel, you may encounter an issue where Excel causes cell contents to be displayed in a wrong format.

The problem is that Excel automatically attempts to recognize the format of the information contained in the cells (text, date etc.), but the information needed to identify it is not available in the CSV file format. In such cases, Excel might not recognize properly the type of cell contents and process, for instance, prices as dates, which can results in the 12.69price changing e.g. its formatjoulu.69.

If you'd like to keep on processing CSV files with Excel, use Excel's import tool for opening CSV files. You can access it via File > Open > Text files.

See also Microsoft's instructions on how to import text files.

Creating an import file in Microsoft Excel

  1. Create a CSV file.
  2. Define the settings of the file to be imported.
    • Character set: select Unicode 6.0 UTF-8. By selecting this character set, you ensure that characters with diacritics such as ä and ö are printed properly.
    • Specify the delimiter and text qualifier.

      Select the same delimiter that you selected when exporting the CSV file from MyCashflow's admin panel (comma or semicolon).

      Select a quotation mark (") as the text qualifier.

    • In the last stage of the setup, you can specify a separate data type for each column of the file to be imported (e.g. text or date).

      You may want to define the product code column as text – especially if some product codes start with 0. In this way you can ensure that Excel won't process the codes e.g. as integers.

      For the price column, select General. In the additional settings for the import, you can define period as the decimal separator to ensure that Excel processes prices as regular decimal numbers.

  3. After you've defined the necessary import settings, you can start processing CSV files as usual.

When importing the file back to your store, make sure to select the same delimiter that you selected when creating the CSV file.