CommentCrateFix garbled characters when you open a comments CSV
Why a CSV can look wrong in a spreadsheet, and three quick ways to make it right.
Why it happens
A CSV is plain text, and the program that opens it has to guess the character encoding. CommentCrate writes CSV files as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which tells Excel the encoding, so a double click normally works. Some setups ignore this and show strange symbols instead of accented letters, or put everything into a single column.
Option 1: use the import dialog in Excel
Open Excel without the file, then choose Data → From Text/CSV and pick the file. Set File origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and the delimiter to Comma, then load the data. Some regional settings expect a semicolon; picking the delimiter yourself avoids that problem.
Option 2: Google Sheets or Numbers
In Google Sheets choose File → Import → Upload and select the file; it reads UTF-8 correctly. Numbers on a Mac also opens UTF-8 files directly.
Option 3: export XLSX instead
The XLSX export stores the text as Unicode inside the workbook, so there is no encoding or delimiter to guess. If a CSV gives you trouble, press XLSX instead; both are free.
Good to know
- Emoji may appear as black-and-white symbols or empty boxes in Excel depending on the font. The data is intact; Google Sheets usually shows them in colour.
- A comment that starts with
=,+,-or@is saved with a leading apostrophe so a spreadsheet never runs it as a formula. - Comments with line breaks stay in one cell; turn on text wrapping to read them.
- The
createdAtcolumn is text in UTC (for example2026-10-12T18:40:00.000Z); the analysis guide shows how to use it.