How to change the Excel’s default delimiter for CSV files

“CSV” is an acronym for “Comma Separate Values”. The Comma is considered a delimiter and can be one of a variety of symbols (other than a comma) and this depends on the settings of your system.

The Enterprise Payments website expects the delimiter in the CSV file to be a comma. If your system settings have a different type of delimiter – e.g. a semicolon – it will affect you in two ways: 

1. CSV Template: the downloaded template won’t look right when you open it in Excel.

2. Create Batch CSV Upload: creating a batch from a CSV file created on your computer will fail due to formatting.

This guide will assist with how to change your system’s default delimiter to comma to ensure that the above two processes can be completed successfully.

Opening the CSV template and changing the delimiter on file import

After downloading the CSV Template from the website, Open Excel first, then click File, then click Open and select the CSV Template. The “Text Import Wizard” dialog box should open: 

Make sure the “Delimited” option is selected and click “Next”. On the next screen deselect any other checkboxes and select the checkbox next to “Comma” and click Next:

Optionally you can change the columns’ data formats to text to avoid numbers being formatted to Excel’s floating-point format; or just click on Finish to see the columns as intended by the Template:

 

Making your own CSV file and changing the delimiter on file save

When saving your Excel file as a .csv file, click on File, then Options, then Advanced to get to Edit Options. Under Edit Options you want to clear the checkbox next to “Use system separators”, set the “Decimal separator” to a period (.), set the “Thousands separator” to a comma (,) and click OK to save: