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Opening Stella CSV Files
Updated over 2 years ago

Files downloaded from Stella in the format .CSV are comma delimited.

In certain regions, the files may not open correctly (Europe or South America, for example), and the data within will be displayed incorrectly.

This is due to regional System settings that have a different default delimiter setting. For example, files will be read with a comma delimiter or semicolon delimiter.

Below are ways for both Windows and OS X to change the default delimiter:

Windows

  1. Open the Windows Start Menu and click Control Panel

  2. Open the Regional and Language Options dialog box

  3. Click the Regional Options tab

  4. Click Customize/Additional settings (Windows 10)

  5. Type a comma into the 'List separator' box (,)

  6. Click 'OK' twice to confirm the change

Note: This only works if the 'Decimal symbol' is also not a comma. If you do not want to change this setting, there is another method to opening comma delimited files below.

OS X

  1. Go to System Preferences

  2. Open the Language & Region pane and go to the Advanced option

  3. Change the 'Decimal Separator' to one of the below scenarios

For MacOS, if the Decimal Separator is a period (.) then the CSV separator will be a comma. If the Decimal Separator is a comma (,) then the CSV separator will be a semicolon.

Alternative method to open CSV files

If you do not want to change the default list separator or decimal symbols, then the below method will be an alternative for the meantime:

  1. Open a new empty spreadsheet in Excel

  2. Go to the Data tab and select 'From Text'

  3. Select the file you want to open

  4. Choose the 'Delimited' option and click Next

  5. Select the correct delimiter which will display the metadata correctly in the Preview pane below

  6. Make your changes to the file and save as .TXT (tab delimited) so that the file is delimited by tabs instead of a variable character.

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