How to Save an Excel File as CSV UTF-8 (Without Surprises)

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

The quick answer: to keep accented and non-English characters intact, choose File → Save As and pick the file type “CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv)” — not the plain “CSV (Comma delimited)” one. That option exists in Excel 2016 and later on Windows and Mac. Two honest catches most guides skip: Excel’s CSV UTF-8 export adds a hidden BOM at the start of the file that some importers choke on, and it only saves the sheet you’re currently looking at. This guide walks the exact steps, then covers both traps and what to do on older Excel.

The steps, by Excel version

Use Save As and pick the file type that has “UTF-8” in its name. The whole fix is one dropdown choice — the trick is knowing your version has it. Find your version in the table, then follow the three steps below.

1. With your workbook open, choose File → Save As and pick the folder you want the file in.
2. In the file-type dropdown, select “CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv)” — look past the plain “CSV (Comma delimited)” entry, which is a different, older format.
3. Type a file name and click Save. If Excel warns that the workbook has features that won’t survive as CSV, that’s normal — click Yes to keep the CSV.

That’s it. Open the result in a text editor and your café, Müller, € and 北京 are all still there, exactly as typed.

CSV vs CSV UTF-8: why the plain option corrupts text

The plain “CSV (Comma delimited)” option saves in your system’s ANSI code page, not Unicode. On most Windows machines that code page is Windows-1252, which can only represent Western European characters. Anything outside that set — a Polish ł, a Turkish ğ, a curly apostrophe pasted from Word, a Chinese or Arabic name — is silently replaced, usually with a plain ?. Nothing warns you; the file looks fine in Excel and only breaks when someone else opens it. If you’ve seen question marks appear where letters should be, this is almost always the cause. CSV UTF-8 avoids it because UTF-8 can encode every character in Unicode, so the export is lossless.

The BOM gotcha nobody mentions

Excel’s CSV UTF-8 writes a UTF-8 byte order mark — the three bytes EF BB BF — at the very start of the file. Excel adds it to recognise the encoding on re-open, which is helpful inside the Microsoft world. Everywhere else it can bite: many importers, database loaders (COPY, LOAD DATA) and scripts don’t expect a BOM and treat those bytes as part of your first column. The classic symptom is a header that reads id instead of id, or a stray  before the first field — which then makes a lookup on the id column mysteriously fail.

So the right choice depends on who reads the file next:

If your destination is a database or a script and it’s rejecting the file or mangling the first column, you need UTF-8 without a BOM. Full detail on what the mark is and how it behaves lives in our guide to the UTF-8 BOM in Excel. And if you’re unsure which Save As option to choose in the first place, see ANSI vs UTF-8 for CSV files.

Only the active sheet gets saved

CSV is a single-table format, so Excel exports only the worksheet you’re currently on — every other tab is left out. This catches people with multi-tab workbooks: the file looks complete because Excel still shows the whole workbook, but the CSV on disk holds one sheet. Before saving, click the tab you actually want and confirm it’s active. To export several sheets, repeat once per tab with its own file name. Excel gives no warning that the others were dropped, so the check is on you.

No CSV UTF-8 option? (Excel 2013 and earlier)

Older Excel has no CSV UTF-8 entry at all — the dropdown stops at plain CSV. You have two reliable workarounds:

1. Save then re-encode. Save the workbook as plain CSV (Comma delimited). If your data is all Western European this may already be fine; if not, open the saved file in a text editor such as Notepad, Notepad++ or VS Code, choose Save As, and set the encoding to UTF-8. This is also the route for removing a BOM from a newer Excel file. The full walkthrough is in how to change a CSV’s encoding to UTF-8.
2. Round-trip through Google Sheets. Upload the workbook to Google Sheets, open it, then choose File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv). Google’s CSV download is always UTF-8, so this sidesteps the old-Excel limitation entirely.

One honest caveat with the re-encode route: saving as plain CSV in old Excel already forces the data through Windows-1252, so any character it couldn’t represent was lost at that step — re-encoding to UTF-8 afterwards can’t bring it back, and a ? that Excel wrote stays a ?. If you have non-Western text, prefer the Google Sheets route, which never passes through the ANSI code page.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Microsoft documents the CSV UTF-8 save option in this Microsoft Q&A on enabling Save As CSV UTF-8 and in the official guide to importing or exporting text and CSV files.