Line Break in CSV|General Excel Questions & Answers|Excel Forum|My Online Training Hub

This isn't strictly an Excel issue but there's a lot of talent on this forum and I thought that someone may have a solution.

I need to migrate data from SQL Server to Salesforce using csv files (unfortunately I'm stuck with csv). In one of my transformations I create a derived column from the values within several other columns, resulting in a 'long text' column (let's call this derived column 'AggText').

So for example say AggText is derived by concatenating the values from the columns Name, City and Gender: one record for Aggtext might be, say, 'Jack-Paris-male' (but ultimately I don't want the components to be separated by dashes - read on).

Once inserted into Salesforce I want the components of AggText to be on separate lines, so in the previous example the data on the page layout would look like this:

Jack
Paris
male

The problem is I can't get those components to end up on separate lines. I've tried various combinations of double quotes, single quotes, line feed characters, carriage return characters etc - no good. If I was starting with the csv then I would just use an 'Alt-Enter' at the end of each component, but starting with SQL Server I can't get any line break to come through to Excel.

My only solution (and its a bit agricultural) is to insert a character between the components that is unlikely to be in the data (say, the '^' character) and once the data is in Excel I do a global replace of that character with ctrl+j (ie. line feed). I'd rather not have to do this extra step at all.

Has anyone done this successfully before?