Excel Saves My CSV With Semicolons Instead of Commas

Updated July 2026 · By the CSVUndo team · 6 min read

The quick answer: when Excel saves a CSV it uses your computer’s list separator as the delimiter — and in many European locales that’s a semicolon, because the comma is already the decimal mark. So your “CSV” comes out semicolon-separated and the next system, which expects commas, rejects it. The safest fix is to re-serialise the file to a true comma CSV with a converter that handles quoting; you can instead change the Windows list separator, but that also rewrites your formula separators, so it’s the heavier option. This is the export side of the delimiter problem — the mirror image of a file that opens with everything in one column.

Why Excel writes semicolons

Excel doesn’t have a fixed idea of what a “comma-separated” file should use as its separator. When it saves a CSV, it uses whatever your operating system has set as the list separator — a Windows regional setting. In the US and UK that’s a comma, so you never notice. But in Germany, France, and much of Europe the comma is the decimal mark (they write 1,5 for one-and-a-half), so the list separator is set to a semicolon to avoid a clash. On those machines, Save As → CSV faithfully writes semicolons between fields.

The file is a perfectly valid semicolon-delimited file — it’s just not what a comma-expecting importer (a US marketplace, an API, a database loader) wants. Crucially, this is the export side of the problem: the file leaves Excel with the wrong delimiter. That’s different from opening someone else’s file and seeing every field jammed into column A, which is the import side, covered in why all your CSV data lands in one column.

Three ways to get commas — and their trade-offs

There isn’t a single “save with commas” checkbox, so pick the option that matches how much you want to change:

The safe per-file fix: convert the delimiter

Re-serialise the semicolon file into a real comma CSV with a proper parser. This is the fix that can’t go wrong, because a real CSV parser knows the difference between a semicolon that separates fields and one that lives inside a value, and it adds the double-quotes a comma file needs around any field that itself contains a comma.

1. Open the CSV ⇆ TSV converter and drop your semicolon file in (its delimiter is detected automatically).
2. Set the output delimiter to Comma.
3. Click Convert & Download. Fields containing commas are quoted for you, so the columns stay aligned.

Changing the Windows list separator (the heavier option)

If you need every CSV Excel saves to use commas from now on, change the setting at its source: Control Panel → Region → Additional settings → List separator, set it to a comma, and Excel will export commas. Be honest with yourself about the cost first, though: the list separator is the same character Excel uses between function arguments, so after the change your formulas switch from =SUM(A1;B1) to =SUM(A1,B1), and it can interact with your decimal and thousands marks. On a shared or work machine that’s a bigger change than it looks — the per-file conversion above avoids all of it.

Why not just find-and-replace the semicolons

Because a blind find-and-replace can’t tell a delimiter from your data. Open the file in a text editor, replace every ; with ,, and you’ll also change any semicolon that was inside a field — a note like "delivered; left with neighbour" silently splits into two columns. Worse, the result still has no quoting around fields that genuinely contain commas, so those break too. A real CSV parser (like the converter above) only ever changes the true field separators and adds the quoting the new format needs, which is exactly why it’s the reliable route.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Microsoft Q&A on Excel exporting semicolons instead of commas and changing the separator when saving a CSV.