What you're missing is hidden behind the scenes. Yes, simply going to Save
As and choosing CSV as the type does the trick.

What you're not seeing is that Excel automatically knows how to read and
'parse' .csv files that it has created. If you look on the hard drive,
you'll find a file with the same name as the original .xls file you started
with, but with a .csv file name extension.

If you'll right-click on the .csv file in your file browser and choose Open
With and then open it using Notepad instead of Excel, you'll see it in the
format similar to what you saw on your colleague's system. However, instead
of semi-colons, the one create with Excel will have commas as separator (csv
actually stands for Comma Separated Values - although there are several
characters that are routinely used as the separator: comma, semi-colon, [Tab]
and even the pipe [|]).


"Jane" wrote:

Hi,

To convert an Excel file to CSV, am I just supposed to go File Save As and
change the type to be CSV? Is the file supposed to instantly look different?
I've seen a colleague's CSV file, with all fields separated by a semi colon,
but mine is staying exactly the same - in a table. I tried using a Data
Text to Columns function but that didn't do anything, and I could only do one
column at a time. I'm using Excel 2000, which I'm unaccustomed to, so pls
excuse me if I'm missing something completely obvious!

Thanks in advance,

Jane