Preparing a spreadsheet that will actually import

Import failures are almost never about the data itself. They are about shape: extra header rows, merged cells, inconsistent columns and invisible characters that humans do not see and parsers refuse to accept.

The rules most systems expect

• One header row, at the very top, with no title or logo above it.
• No merged cells anywhere.
• Every row with the same number of columns.
• No blank rows in the middle, which many parsers treat as the end of the file.
• Dates in one consistent format throughout.
• Numbers without currency symbols or thousands separators, which turn a number into text.

Cleaning up quickly

Clean CSV or Excel Data trims stray spaces, removes empty rows and columns and can normalise headers to lowercase with underscores, which many systems prefer. Remove Duplicate Rows deals with the other frequent rejection reason, comparing whole rows or just the columns that define uniqueness, such as email.

Check before you upload

CSV Validator reports what a parser will see: the delimiter it detected, rows with the wrong column count, unbalanced quotes and encoding problems. It takes a few seconds and is far quicker than interpreting an error message from an import tool that says only "line 4,213 invalid".

Encoding and delimiters

If names in Hindi or Tamil arrive as question marks or strange symbols, the file was saved in the wrong encoding. Export as UTF-8 with the byte order mark, or rewrite the file with Change CSV Delimiter, which also switches between commas, semicolons and tabs when a system insists on one of them.