Keeping commas inside cells while exporting csv

Yeah, depending on how the CSV file is created, CSV files sometimes don’t play nicely with long text that includes things like line breaks, commas, internal quotes, etc.

Can you export from Homebase directly to Excel format without going through CSV? They copy/paste from Excel to Airtable? I’ve had to do some multi-step conversion processes like this when CSV just wouldn’t play nice.

Since I’m halfway through cleaning up this CSV, I’m planning to copy/paste one field/column at a time into Airtable. I’m more worried about what will happen when I download the CSV file from Airtable so that I can upload it to Amazon and other marketplaces.

An old thread, but here’s a solution for anyone trying to download a base as .csv, when it contains a lot of long text with commas and semi-colons etc. Normally such a file would open with the text from a single cell being spread over several columns because of the commas being interpreted as separators.

A workaround is to do it via a Google Sheets extension called Coefficient. Open a blank table in Sheets, click on extension, find and and install Coefficient. Coefficient can connect to Airtable and bring the data across to Sheets.

Have the Airtable base open in another browser tab and paste its URL into the Coefficient dialogue in Sheets. Coefficient lets you choose which base you want and which fields in the base. It doesn’t bring data across as .csv, so all the text is in its correct cell.

You then save and download the Sheet as an .xlsx file. The file will have some branding from Coefficient but this is easily deleted. The .xlsx file should open with all text in the correct cells irrespective of commas or semi-colons.

​@P-Green No, that is not true. Airtable handles CSV exports just fine for all rich text fields, including fields with line breaks, commas, and semi-colons. No need for any browser extensions.

And the original author ​was asking about importing CSV files into Airtable, not exporting.

To answer the original author’s question: The standard for CSV files is that quotation marks should be put around strings of text that have a comma within them, and Airtable will properly interpret those strings of text upon importing.

If you’re not getting that type of CSV format with the quotation marks, see if you can manipulate that format in your source app before exporting/importing, or see if you can manipulate the CSV file before importing.

Also, you mentioned that you were using Homebase. Homebase is natively supported by Make’s automations & integrations, so you could just create an automation in Make to import your data from Homebase into Airtable, without exporting/importing CSV files at all.

Make also offers its own CSV tools, so you could automate CSV imports & exports. I discuss importing and exporting CSV files with Make on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast. 

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld