Guides & articles

Three long-form pieces on the things that actually go wrong in CSV exports, written while building the cleaner.

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The 12 most common CSV problems (and how to fix each)

Wrong delimiter, broken quotes, ragged rows, BOM, mixed dates, comma decimals, Excel eating leading zeros — what each problem looks like in the raw file and the exact fix.

6 min read · August 2026

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CSV encoding: UTF-8, BOM, windows-1251 and why Excel shows garbage

Why the same file reads as «привет» in one program and «Ð¿Ñ€Ð¸Ð²ÐµÑ‚» in another, what the BOM actually does, and how to get Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers to open a Cyrillic CSV correctly.

5 min read · June 2026

Close-up of a laptop screen showing a visitor trend line and a two-slice pie chart, with a phone lying next to the keyboard

Deduplicating data before you import it: exact, fuzzy and key-based

Normalise first, then choose your definition of “the same row” — byte-identical, same key column, or merely similar. Each choice removes a different set of rows, and the wrong one is expensive to undo in a CRM.

5 min read · September 2026