Why does Excel break long URLs in my CSV?

Excel sometimes auto-formats CSV cells as numbers, dates or scientific notation — long URLs with digit-heavy paths can get truncated to '1.23E+14'. The fix: import via Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV (Power Query path) and explicitly set every column type to Text before loading. The legacy double-click-to-open path doesn't give you that control, so use it only for small or visually inspected files. The other common issue is BOM-less UTF-8 — Excel sometimes reads CSV as Windows-1252, mangling unicode in URLs. xmlsitemapmaker.com writes UTF-8 with quoted fields, but if you see garbled characters, save as UTF-8 with BOM or open the file in Google Sheets instead.