Unreadable Thai in a CSV may reflect an encoding mismatch rather than missing data. Start with an untouched copy and identify which symptom you have before saving changes.
Three symptoms, three checks
| Symptom | Check first |
|---|---|
| Thai becomes unexpected characters | Text encoding, such as UTF-8 |
| All fields appear in one column | The delimiter, such as comma or semicolon |
| Product code 00123 becomes 123 | The column's data type |
Microsoft explains that opening CSV uses Excel's default data-format settings. It also states that UTF-8 CSV files saved with a BOM can open normally; text import is an alternative when they lack that marker.
Import in Excel
- Start a new workbook and find Data → From Text/CSV, or the equivalent option under Get Data → From File.
- Select the untouched file and check the encoding in the preview. Choose UTF-8 when that is the source encoding.
- Check that the delimiter separates headers and values into the intended columns.
- Set identifiers and phone-number columns to text before loading to retain leading zeros.
Menu names vary by version. Correct Thai text alone is not enough: inspect the column boundaries and identifiers too.
Convert CSV to XLSX with FileMyLove
Open convert document, choose the CSV and select XLSX as the output. The browser processes the file locally and attempts to detect its encoding and delimiter.
The current reader recognises UTF-8 and UTF-16 BOMs. Without a BOM, it tries valid UTF-8 first, then falls back to Windows-874 when UTF-8 decoding fails. This heuristic cannot guarantee correct interpretation of every export from every system.
The converter stores values such as 00123 as text in XLSX. It cannot restore zeros already absent from the source. Open and check the downloaded workbook before relying on it.
Our suggested verification checklist
Compare the header, first, middle and final rows with the source. Check row counts, identifiers with leading zeros, dates and money values. Use non-personal sample data when asking someone to troubleshoot the problem.
If the saved source already contains ??? in place of characters, request a fresh export. Changing the file format does not recreate missing characters.
For more on workbook formats, read XLS versus XLSX. Keep the original separate from the converted copy so you can retry without compounding a mistaken import.
