Importing CSV files containing line breaks within fields is tricky and the usual import methods as described for Excel do not work. Only opening a file directly with “File -> Open…” menu command or by double-clicking it and making sure it is opened by Excel works for such files. With this technique the line breaks within fields do not get garbled up. However, there is no way to tell Excel about the encoding. If the CSV file is UTF-8 encoded, Excel ignores diacritical characters such as é etc. and cannot represent those characters correctly. It seems Excel assumes a system specific encoding. E.g. on a Mac it assumes Mac encoding. The import succeeds when one uses a technique to change the encoding from UTF-8 to the native encoding. If the mapping does not work, one needs to edit the file accordingly. BBEdit offers nice features to detect such non-mappable characters and may help to edit them and to obtain a CSV file that can be fully imported into Excel. If BBEdit is not available you might need to use a command line tool such as the Gnu iconv or similar.
Note, the usual recommendations to use “File -> Import” or “Data -> Get External Data -> Import Text File…” DO NOT WORK, as all these methods fail to properly import line breaks within fields and completely garble up multiline text within a single cell.
