I had a similar question. When I exported to CSV, the columns were comma-delimited, but sometimes there were commas in the Airtable cells, so it messed up my columns. This uses Excel outside of Airtable, of course, so the usual disclaimers apply from their end, I’m sure.
I figured out that I could export the CSV, and then use Power Query to bring the file into Excel. It looks like if Airtable sees a cell with a comma in it, it puts quotes around the cell’s contents. Ordinary Excel imports don’t know what to do with the quotes, and neither do Access imports. However, I found that I could enable Power Query, and then use the “data” tab to import the CSV. It then opens it in Power Query. I clicked the “Transform Data” tab at the bottom of the Power Query dialog, and then clicked the “Transform” tab at the top of the next dialog. There, I chose “Use First Row as Headers” and clicked “Close & Load” under the “Home” tab. It’s important to realize that the resulting table (“List” in Excel parlance) is live, so that if you refresh it, it will reload from the original file. Of course you can then copy and paste the data to sever the connection to the CSV file.
This isn’t a particularly elegant solution, but it does get information out. There’s still the problem of separating your data into separate rows if you want to break up a big table into a relational database, but at least your data’s there and readable.
