Excel treats any cell starting with =, +, - or @ as the start of a formula - so a product genuinely titled something like "=Waterproof Jacket" (rarer than it sounds, but it happens with certain naming conventions) can open showing a #NAME? error instead of the actual title.

This tool escapes those cells automatically on every export: a leading apostrophe is added in front of any value that starts with one of those characters, which tells Excel (and Google Sheets, and Numbers) to treat it as plain text. The apostrophe itself isn’t visible in the cell - only the correct title is.

This is on by default and isn’t something you need to configure - it’s applied to every text cell in every export, from any of the three formats.

The same protection covers every text column, not just titles - a SKU or option value that happens to start with one of those characters gets escaped exactly the same way, since the underlying rule is about the cell’s content, not which specific field it happens to be in.