TrustpilotTrustpilotWhen you export Trustpilot reviews you usually get a choice of CSV, Excel (XLSX) or JSON. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one produces a file that is technically correct and practically useless. Here is how to choose, and the one trap that catches almost everyone.
If that settles it, you can stop here. The rest is why, and the details that bite.
CSV is the safest default because essentially everything reads it. A well-written CSV follows the RFC 4180 standard: it quotes any field that contains a comma, a quotation mark or a line break, doubles the quotes inside a quoted field, and includes a UTF-8 byte order mark so accents and emoji survive.
That last detail is not optional for reviews. Review text is full of accented characters, emoji and multi-line paragraphs, and a CSV writer that gets quoting or encoding wrong turns a clean 3,000-row export into a mess of broken rows and garbled characters. When you evaluate an exporter, this is the thing to test first: export a page with long, emoji-laden reviews and see whether the file opens cleanly.
Here is the one that wastes an afternoon. CSV does not actually mandate the comma. In many locales, French and German among them, Excel expects a semicolon as the column separator, because those languages use the comma as a decimal point. Open a comma-separated file in a semicolon-expecting Excel and every review lands in a single column.
The fix is to export with the separator your spreadsheet expects. A good exporter lets you pick, and defaults sensibly by locale. If you keep hitting this, the Excel format below avoids the question altogether, because it stores columns as structure rather than as delimited text.
The XLSX export is a real workbook, not a renamed CSV. That difference matters in two concrete ways.
First, it has no separator problem and no encoding problem, because columns and text are stored as structure rather than punctuated with commas. A review with line breaks, commas and emoji lands in exactly one cell, intact, every time.
Second, it can carry more than the raw grid. A good Excel export includes:
Pick Excel when the file goes to a colleague or a client, or when the reviews are long enough that you want to read them in place rather than in a formula bar.
The JSON export is an array of review objects with consistent field names and preserved types. If a script, a database loader or a dashboard is going to consume the file, this is the format that needs no parsing rules and no guessing about whether a rating is a number or a string.
For a human with a spreadsheet, JSON is the wrong choice: it is not meant to be read in a grid. For a pipeline, it is usually the right one.
Independently of format, you can usually choose which columns to export. Two presets cover most needs: a full export with every field, and an essential export with just rating, text and date. Trimming to the essentials keeps files small when you only need the basics, and keeps a client-facing report from drowning in columns nobody asked about.
The format decides how the data is written, not where it goes. With a browser-based exporter like ExportReviews, the file is generated locally in your browser for CSV, Excel and JSON alike, and review content never passes through a server. The choice between formats is purely about what reads the file next.
If you have not exported anything yet, start with the step-by-step guide, then come back here when you hit the separator trap, because eventually you will.
Your Excel expects a semicolon as the column separator and the file used commas, or the reverse. This is a regional setting: French, German and several other locales default to the semicolon. The fix is to export with the separator your Excel expects, or to use the Excel format instead, which sidesteps the question entirely.
The file was read without knowing it is UTF-8. A correctly written CSV includes a byte order mark that tells Excel and Sheets to read it as UTF-8, and accents and emoji then render properly with no manual import step. If your tool omits that mark, the same bytes come out as mojibake.
Yes. A proper XLSX writes the review body into a single cell, line breaks and all, because it stores structure rather than delimiting with commas. This is the main reason to prefer Excel over CSV for long, multi-paragraph reviews that you want to read in place.
CSV for spreadsheets, CRMs and most import wizards, because nearly everything accepts it. JSON if code is going to read the file, because it keeps field types and needs no parsing rules. Excel mainly when a human will open the file directly.
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