[Solved] Import CSV into spreadsheet

[PurebldKING]

Can someone PLEASE tell me, in easy-to-understand language without a ton of techno-jargon, how to convert .csv to .ods? I'm not a programmer and I am NOT understanding this...

Extremely frustrated...

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Open Calc and then from the Calc menu File > Open, open your .csv, you'll see a dialog to define the separators.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the ✎ button if your issue has been fixed.

[MrProgrammer]

Can someone PLEASE tell me … how to convert .csv to .ods?

When you open the CSV file, the dialog is fairly simple to use. Try it and see. I have more details in this tutorial if you need them. The most common mistake with CSV imports is to accept all of the defaults in the dialog. Often, you will need to provide some guidance to Calc to ensure a successful import, since the CSV format has no standards. There are hundreds of topics in this forum from people who had trouble because they failed to provide guidance and accepted all the default settings of the dialog.
[Tutorial] Text to Columns

If you need any additional assistance attach a sample of your CSV data demonstrating the situation. We probably only need to see about a dozen lines. I will not help further unless you provide a sample of your data.

[Villeroy]

This is one of those weird csv flavours me and LibreOffice are confronted with. One line of data from an actual banking account opened with a plain text editor.

Code: Select all

10.01.2022;10.01.2022;"Dauerauftrag Überweisung";"Stadtwerke xxxxxxx";"VKto 2135004 Stadtwerke xxxxxxxx Info: VKto 2135004";EUR;;1.579;"759,78"

Columns are separated by commasemicolon.
2 dates in German notation.
3 columns of text enclosed in double-quotes
Currency symbol EUR in a separate column.
A number in German notation with point as thousands separator.
Last column has a number in double-quotes (why? don't know). Comma as decimal separator.

Bildschirmfoto von 2025-05-05 18-41-23.png (36.45 KiB) Viewed 334 times

Character set: If I choose a wrong character set, the text in the 3rd column reads something like "Dauerauftrag Ãœberweisung" instead of "Dauerauftrag Überweisung" because some "exotic" characters are wrongly interpreted.
Language: German (Germany) because all the dates and decimals need to be interpreted as numeric spreadsheet values in German context.
Columns are separated by semicolon.
String delimiter: Some of the text is enclosed in double-quotes, so they can have semicolons without separating the text in columns.
Format quoted fields as text: No, because my weird csv has one number in double-quotes. It is the account balance, and I want this number imported correctly.
Detect special numbers: This should always be checked if the data set contains dates, times, percents, numbers with currency symbols in the same column.
In the preview at the bottom, you can mark individual columns and declare them as different from the other rules, for instance if there were a column with US-dates or point decimals.

These settings are stored. Next time you open a similar csv from the same source, you just need to confirm this dialog with same setting.