Excel→CSV reduces a workbook to one text table
Excel can hold multiple sheets, formulas, formatting, and cell types. CSV is essentially rows and columns of text. This tool exports the displayed values from the selected worksheet; it does not carry the workbook appearance into CSV.
CSV→Excel writes values as text on purpose
Identifiers such as 00123 are written as strings so leading zeros are preserved. The trade-off is that the converter does not guess which columns should become numeric/date cells for calculation.
A UTF-8 BOM is a compatibility choice
A BOM can make UTF-8 CSV easier for some Windows Excel workflows to recognize, while web systems may explicitly require UTF-8 without BOM. The destination specification wins when one exists.
An empty CSV is not a successful conversion
Blank or effectively empty CSV/TSV input is rejected instead of producing an empty workbook that looks successful. CSV→Excel is also limited to 200,000 rows.
A practical example
Export one catalog worksheet to CSV for an ecommerce upload, or turn a Shift_JIS CSV into .xlsx for a colleague. Check important ID columns in the preview before saving.