Opening CSV and text files cleanly in Grid by Zaweba

CSV is the plain envelope that data travels in. Bank statements, online shop orders, survey results, exports from accounts software and website analytics all arrive as .csv or a close relative. Grid by Zaweba opens .csv, .tsv and .txt files and turns them into a proper sheet, and saves a sheet back out as CSV when another program needs one.

What Grid works out for you

Two things trip people up with CSV files. The first is the encoding, the way characters are stored. Get it wrong and accented names, pound signs or euro signs turn into strings of odd symbols. The second is the delimiter, the character that separates fields. Commas are common, but semicolons are used in many European countries, and tabs in TSV files.

Grid detects both automatically when it opens the file. In most cases you open the file and the columns simply land where they should, with the right characters.

Importing without damage

Grid opens these files without damaging the data on import. That matters because plain text gives no hints about what each field is meant to be, and a careless import can turn long account numbers or product codes into numbers or dates and lose the original text. Still, check a few rows after opening, especially columns of codes, phone numbers with leading zeros and dates.

After opening

A CSV holds values and nothing else: no formulas, formatting, column widths or multiple sheets. Once it's open in Grid, you can add all of those. A sensible first pass is AutoFit on the columns, freeze the header row, format the amount column as currency and the date column as dates, then turn the range into a table so you can sort, filter and add a total row.

Then save as .zagr or .xlsx. If you save back to CSV, everything you've added except the values is left out, because the format can't hold it.

Saving as CSV

Grid saves the current sheet as CSV. That's the way to hand data to another program that imports CSV: a mailing tool, an online shop, accounts software or a database. Only the sheet you're on is saved, since CSV has no idea of multiple sheets, so if your workbook has several, switch to the one you want first.

Before saving, make sure the sheet contains just the data the other program expects, usually a single header row and then one record per row, with no titles, totals or blank rows above. Keep your working copy as .zagr or .xlsx and treat the CSV as an export.

Common jobs

For a bank statement, open the CSV, add a category column with a drop-down from data validation, then use a pivot table to see spending by category. For online shop orders, open the export, use Remove Duplicates on the order number if the export overlaps the last one, and use Text to Columns or TEXTSPLIT on any field that packs several values together. For a list going to a mailing tool, clean the email column, check for duplicates and save as CSV.

Grid appears in Open with for .csv and .tsv files without taking them over, so double-clicking a CSV still opens whatever program you had before, and choosing Grid is a right-click away.

Plain text files are the most common way data reaches a spreadsheet. Grid by Zaweba makes the first step, getting them open with nothing mangled, the easy part.