Why Korean text breaks in CSV files, and 4 ways to fix it in Excel

You download an order history, public data or a member list as CSV and open it in Excel, and the Korean text looks like "ê°€ë‚˜ë‹¤" or "��". The data is fine. Excel simply guessed the wrong encoding.

The cause: encodings and the BOM

What is an encoding?

Computers store characters as numbers. The rule that decides which number "가" becomes is called an encoding. Two encodings are common in Korea:

EUC-KR (CP949): used by older Windows programs and many public-sector and financial systems
UTF-8: the global standard, used by web services, Google Sheets, macOS and Linux

What is a BOM?

A 3-byte marker (EF BB BF) placed at the start of a UTF-8 file. Excel for Windows tends to read a file as UTF-8 if it has a BOM and as EUC-KR if it does not. That is why double-clicking a UTF-8 CSV without a BOM breaks the Korean text.

Fix 1. Use Excel's "From Text/CSV" import

This is the most reliable method.

Open a blank workbook in Excel.
Click Data > From Text/CSV and select the file.
In the preview, switch File Origin between 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and 949: Korean until the Korean text looks right.
Click Load.

Fix 2. Re-save with the right encoding in Notepad

Open the CSV file in Notepad, which detects encodings fairly well.
Choose File > Save As and set the encoding to UTF-8 with BOM.
Now the Korean text displays correctly even when you double-click the file in Excel.

Fix 3. Go through Google Sheets

Google Sheets recognizes UTF-8 CSV files well. Import the file and download it as Excel (.xlsx), and it will open in Excel without broken text. Keep in mind that the file is uploaded to Google's servers.

Fix 4. Use a viewer that detects the encoding

If you only need to see the content, dropping the file into the CSV Viewer is fastest. It tries UTF-8 first and switches to EUC-KR automatically, so you never have to choose an encoding. Nothing is uploaded, so member lists and other sensitive data stay on your device.

Preventing broken CSV files

When saving from Excel, choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) to save as UTF-8 with a BOM.
If you are a developer exporting CSV from a system, adding a BOM at the start of the file greatly reduces complaints from Excel users.
If the recipient must upload the file to an older system, check which encoding it requires (often EUC-KR).

Bonus: disappearing leading zeros

Excel turns phone numbers starting with "010" and codes like "00123" into numbers and drops the leading zeros. Set the column's data type to Text during import to keep them. The CSV viewer shows the original text, so this never happens there.