Saving a CSV File With the Correct Data Format

When a CSV file is to be prepared for import, some conditions need to be checked, so prepare first the data on a Excel spreadsheet and make sure that:

The data does not contain the characters below, as these will break the data in different cells when imported:

" (quotation mark)

' (apostrophe)

, (comma)

; (semicolon)

: (colon)

To do this, use the Ctrl + H function on the spreadsheet to find these characters and if they exist replace them with something else (a space, or a - hyphen or nothing).

• The spreadsheet DOES NOT contain Header Rows

After this is done, and the data is ready to be saved:

• Select to SAVE AS and select the format CSV.
• Close Excel completely
• Reopen Excel (the program only, not the spreadsheet you just saved) on a blank spreadsheet
• From the DATA menu, depending on your version of Excel, it may be necessary to select Get External Data before seeing the option to select to import FROM TEXT, this will ask you to find the CSV file you saved previously and then it will open the Text Import Wizard screen.
• 
• Select DELIMITED as the Type and click NEXT:

 

Select COMMA as the only DELIMITER and make sure you select NONE as text qualifier, then click NEXT:

 

Highlight all the columns in the data preview section and then select TEXT as the data format, and then click FINISH:

 

You will then see a little pop up asking you which cell to put the data into, and on this one you just click OK

 

FINALLY, your data is ready, DO NOT modify anything and SAVE AS a CSV file (you can override the original one you had or you can give it a new name, but this is the one you will import into INFUSION, just make sure that once it is saved and closed, it is never opened again before the import is done, because opening it as a normal CSV, you can break the format and the data does not import correctly.