Google Sheets → CSV

My Google Sheets CSV opens with everything in one column

You downloaded a sheet as CSV, but instead of neat columns every row is one long string full of semicolons — Alice;42;London — and whatever you opened it in refuses to split it.

What’s actually breaking

“CSV” means comma-separated values, but not everywhere. In locales where the comma is the decimal separator (much of Europe, South America and beyond), a number like “one and a half” is written 1,5, not 1.5. If such a file also used commas to separate columns, that single value would split into two — 1 and 5 — and every decimal in the sheet would break.

To avoid that, Google Sheets (and Excel) switch the column separator to a semicolon in those locales, so 1,5 stays one number and columns are divided by ; instead. The export you get is perfectly valid — it just isn’t comma-delimited. A tool that blindly assumes commas finds none to split on and drops the whole row into a single column, which is why you see Alice;42;London sitting in column A.

It’s not something you did wrong, and it’s not a corrupt file. The separator is a regional setting — the same sheet exported by a colleague in a comma-decimal locale would come out semicolon-delimited too, whether or not the data has any decimals in it at all.

How xlsx-for-ai handles it

xlsx-for-ai doesn’t assume the separator — its CSV reader detects the delimiter and reads your columns correctly whether the file uses commas or semicolons. Point it at a semicolon-separated export and the fields split where they should, so Alice;42;London becomes three columns rather than one.

That delimiter detection is live and is the claim we stand behind here. We’re still hardening the trickier locale edge — a file that combines semicolon columns and comma decimals inside the same numbers — so if your data has both, give the parsed numbers a quick look. For the common case (everything crammed into one column because the export used semicolons), xfa reads it right the first time.

How to fix your file

  1. Add the connector to Claude once (how), or use it directly — either way there’s no signup.
  2. Export from Google Sheets. Choose File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv) for the sheet you want.
  3. Hand it to xfa. Ask Claude: 
    Read this CSV with xfa and show me the columns
exactly as they parsed.
    You’ll see the columns split correctly, with the delimiter it detected called out.
  4. Prefer the live Sheet? You can also point xlsx_read at the Sheet by id (read-only token, setup here) and ask for CSV back.
Prefer commas? Ask xfa to read the semicolon CSV and hand it back as a standard comma-delimited CSV — then it opens cleanly anywhere that expects commas.

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