“The columns are shifted or merged after CSV import”
Amounts showing up in the date column, half a description becoming its own field, every row landing in one giant cell — CSV column chaos comes down to a handful of root causes, and each is visible the moment you know what to look for.
Symptoms
Everything imports into a single column Columns shift right partway down the file The importer rejects random rows with "invalid date" or "invalid amount"
What actually causes it
Unquoted commas inside descriptions
A description like Transfer to John, savings contains a comma that splits it into two fields, shifting every column after it on that row. Correct CSV wraps such fields in quotes — some bank exports do not.
Semicolon delimiters
Excel in most of Europe saves CSV with ";" between columns. Importers expecting commas read each row as one column.
UTF-8 BOM in the header
An invisible marker attaches itself to the first column name, so the importer cannot match "Date" and treats the header as data or fails the mapping.
How to fix it
- Drop the CSV into the checker below — it reports the delimiter, rows whose column count differs from the header, and any BOM (all locally in your browser).
- Semicolon delimiters, blank lines and the BOM are converted/removed automatically.
- Rows broken by unquoted commas are listed with their line numbers — those need a quick manual fix in a spreadsheet editor, because no tool can safely guess which comma was part of the text.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
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