Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Comma-Delimited and MS-DOS CSV Variations.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 23, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Steve notes that Excel allows saving a worksheet in several different CSV formats. He understands the differences between most of the variants, but he's at a loss as to the difference between the "CSV (Comma delimited)" and "CSV (MS-DOS)" formats.
For most people there is very little difference between these two versions. (There are much bigger differences between these versions and the Macintosh CSV version, which Excel also supports.) The reason is that there is little difference between what the two formats create. With most data, you could create a file in the two formats and compare them byte-for-byte and find no differences.
The difference between the two is important, however, if you have certain special characters in text fields; for example, an accented (foreign language) character. If you export as Windows CSV, those fields are encoded using the Windows-1252 code page. DOS encoding usually uses code page 437, which maps characters used in old pre-Windows PCs. If you export as one and then import with a tool that expects the other, most things will look fine, but you'll get unexpected results if, for example, you know someone with an umlaut (or other foreign character) in their name.
Essentially, CSV comma delimited is used by Windows and CSV MS-DOS is used by older DOS-based operating systems and you would rarely encounter issues except in the circumstances outlined above.
Additional information on code pages can be found at this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9508) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Comma-Delimited and MS-DOS CSV Variations.
Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!
Don't you hate opening a workbook and seeing error messages? If you see a message that some "invalid names" were detected ...
Discover MoreDelimited files are often created through Excel so that your data can be exported to other programs. If the delimited ...
Discover MoreOpen a workbook that someone else is working on, and you won't be able to save your changes back into the same file. ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
2023-05-06 10:41:08
Ajay Kapoor
I prepared about 80 files in Excel 365 for the employees, showing their Member ID, Month/Year, Wages. Pension etc and converted it into comma seperated CSV(MS-DOS) excel file. Then it was opened in notepad. Then all "," was replaced with " #~#" as per requirement. All the files were saved and successfully uploaded against their name on employer PF site. While approving with DSE all files were approved except six file showing error " Error while approving file. Plese try again" The process of approval was repeated with these six file again and again but failed. Please help to resolve this issue.
2021-02-06 16:31:10
Profesor Yeow
Thanks for this. I never know about CP437.. and it's very useful for convert to UTF-8
2020-03-27 12:50:05
Gonzalo
Hi Allen
I've tried saving a CSV (Windows) in Excel for Mac, and it doesn't change the encoding (it still uses MacRoman), the difference is the newline characters. Can you verify that?
I've tried also using a macro, saving the file with the xlCSVWindows FileFormat and got the same result: MacRoman encoding.
2020-03-02 05:33:42
Richard Curtis
A database app that I use expects a CSV file in UTF-8 format. I use Excel to create such CSVs but how can I get Excel to save in this format by default?
Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2025 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
Comments