Save a semi-colon delimited file in Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a great program, especially when you are created delimited files to import into MySQL databases. However, when you have commas within data columns, using commas as the delimiter will ruin your day. A better approach is to use semi-colons as the delimiter…But Excel does not give you this option. So, the easiest approach is to make this change in the Windows settings.
To do so:
1. Go to START>SETTINGS>REGIONAL AND LANGUAGE OPTIONS
2. Click on the CUSTOMIZE button
3. Next to LIST SEPARATOR, type in a semi-colon (;)
This will set the default delimiter value to a semi-colon. So, when you save a file in Excel as .csv, you will have semi-colons to separate the row data.
Note: I used Windows XP for the above settings. A different flavor of Windows might have different options.
February 2nd, 2010
Thank you so much! It was clear, simple and to-the-point
Does not work in Windows 7 with Excel 2010.
In Windows 7, go to Control Panel -> Clock, Language, and Region -> Region and Language -> click “Additional settings…”, and change the value next to “List separator:”