Exporting contact form entries to a CSV file

A good export gives one row per entry and one column per field, named by the field's label, plus the date and status. It should also be safe to open: a value typed into a public form can start with =, and a spreadsheet will run it as a formula unless the export neutralises it.

Why CSV exports need to be careful

Anyone on the internet can type into your contact form. If someone enters =HYPERLINK("http://…","Click") as their name, and the export writes it as-is, Excel or LibreOffice may treat it as a formula when you open the file. This is called CSV or formula injection, and the standard defence is to put an apostrophe in front of any value that starts with =, +, -, @, a tab or a carriage return, so the spreadsheet shows it as text.

See how a value is written to the CSV export

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What Mailbag's export contains

One column per field, headed by the field's label, then Date and Status.
Commas, quotes and line breaks inside values quoted the standard way (RFC 4180), so a message with several paragraphs stays in one cell.
UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, so Excel shows names such as Søren or Zoë correctly instead of garbled characters.
The apostrophe rule above, on every value.

Opening it

In Excel, open the file directly or use Data → From Text/CSV. In Google Sheets, use File → Import. If a date column looks odd, set the column's format; the file stores the text as your site showed it.

Exporting a whole form, not a whole site

Filter the Entries list to one form before exporting when you need a clean sheet for, say, quote requests only. To move the form itself to another site — not its entries — use the JSON export described in copying a form to another site.

Mailbag Contact Form is a free contact form that saves every entry before it sends anything, and shows you what happened to each email.

See what it does