I know this must be bread and butter to most of you techies out there but I'm not so technical myself. I downloaded my bank statements last night which usually come through in .xls format but for some reason they are now .csv files. How can I convert them as they are unreadable. Managed to download the again at work and they came through as .xls so maybe it was a one off glitch but would be good to know in case it happens again. dowloading from rbs digital site using aol bb connection.

I havn't tried this software myself but this software (http://www.downloadseeker.com/5890.html) seems to be able to handle it :thumbsup:

.csv is a comma delimited text file.

Excel should be able to open this and the commas separate the data into their different cells.

Start Excel and then open the file.
When you do this you will be given some option boxes where you will select "delimited" and "comma" where necessary.
Also a preview box should show you what it will look like with different options.
If is too messy first time you can always try again with different column widths etc.

Once you've got it opened in Excel, the way you want it, you can then save it as an .xls file for future use.

tried just openeing file last night which is when I discovered the problem. still at work at the moment but will try again when I get home.

CSV stands for Comma seperated value file.
I agree with cgksheff,
use Excel to convert them, it's dead simple.

Originally posted by commuter
tried just openeing file last night which is when I discovered the problem. still at work at the moment but will try again when I get home.

Did you sort it?

Sorry for the length of time its taken me to reply. Sorted! Converted it using Excel it is simple but a real pain in the butt. there seems to be no reason for anything to have changed in the way my pc downloads files (no upgrades etc) Still at least I can now monitor how overdrawn I am.

It may well just be that the site has changed the way they give you the files - maybe a few people complained that they didn't have Excel or any program that could read its files (although I would have thought anything that could read csv files would cope with xls?). At least with csv you could even look at the data easily in Notepad or any other text editor...

if it's HSBC you get the option of several different formats, you may have accidentally selected csv (or they changed the default).

it's RBS and there is no option to save as when downloading.