Shopify does not export orders to Excel. It exports them to CSV — including an option labelled for use with spreadsheet programs — and a CSV is a plain text file, not a workbook. For a lot of tasks that distinction doesn’t matter. For anything involving postal codes, SKUs, phone numbers, or dates, it matters a great deal.
What the built-in export gives you
From your Shopify admin, go to Orders, use the filters or search to narrow the list, then click Export. You choose which orders to include — the current page, all orders, the ones you’ve selected, or everything matching your current filter — and Shopify produces a CSV. Larger exports arrive as an emailed download link rather than an immediate download.
The result is one file with a fixed set of columns, in a fixed order, using Shopify’s header names. Orders with several line items span several rows. That’s the whole feature: it’s reliable, it’s free, and it’s not configurable.
Why the CSV looks wrong when you open it
Excel doesn’t read a CSV so much as guess at it. Every value is untyped text, and Excel applies its own interpretation on open. The usual casualties:
- Leading zeros vanish. A postal code of
02134becomes2134. SKUs like00451lose their padding and stop matching your warehouse system. - Dates get rewritten into your machine’s local format, so the same file opened in Halifax and in Berlin produces two different spreadsheets.
- Long numbers go scientific. Order references and barcodes turn into
1.23457E+11. - Accented characters break. Depending on how Excel is configured, a UTF-8 file
opened directly can render
MüllerasMüller. (If you’re seeing this with an Exportify CSV, Characters look wrong in Excel has the fix.)
None of this is Shopify’s fault, and none of it is recoverable after the fact — once Excel has stripped a leading zero and you’ve saved, the original value is gone.
Opening a Shopify CSV safely in Excel
If you’re staying with the native export, don’t double-click the file. Import it instead, so you control how each column is typed:
- Open a blank workbook in Excel.
- Go to Data → From Text/CSV and pick the downloaded file.
-
Set File Origin to
65001: Unicode (UTF-8)so accented characters survive. - Choose Transform Data rather than Load, and set every column that should keep its exact characters — postal codes, SKUs, phone numbers, order references — to Text.
- Load, then save as
.xlsxso the typing sticks.
This works. The problem is that it’s five careful steps performed by a human, every single time, and one distracted double-click undoes it.
If you export orders once a quarter to eyeball them, the import wizard is the right answer and you don’t need an app. The case for anything else starts when the export is a recurring job someone has to get right.
Getting a real .xlsx file instead
The alternative is to have the export produced as a genuine Excel workbook, with types already
correct, so there is nothing to interpret on open. That’s what
Exportify does: you pick Excel (.xlsx) as the output format
and the file arrives as a workbook rather than a text file Excel has to parse. It’s a single
setting — see Choose a file format in the help centre.
Alongside the format, you get control over what’s in it:
- Choose which of the order, line item, customer, tax, and financial fields appear.
- Drag columns into the order your spreadsheet or pivot table expects.
- Rename headers, so
Lineitem quantitycan just beQty. - Save it as a reusable template, so next month’s export is identical to this one.
Exportify is a paid app — from $14.99 per 30 days, with a 15-day free trial. See the plan breakdown for what’s included at each tier.
Which approach fits
| If you’re… | Use |
|---|---|
| Pulling orders occasionally to read them | Native CSV export, opened via Data → From Text/CSV |
| Sending the same report to the same people every week | A saved template producing .xlsx directly |
| Feeding a pivot table or an accounting import | A template with the exact columns and headers that import expects |
| Handing the file to someone outside your team | .xlsx, so their Excel can’t reinterpret it either |
