“The statement opens as text in my browser instead of downloading”
Clicking the download link and getting a page full of tags is a browser decision, not a broken file. The data is intact — it is just being displayed rather than saved, and the way you rescue it from the screen determines whether it stays intact.
Symptoms
A wall of tags and numbers fills the browser tab The saved file has an .html or .txt extension instead of .ofx or .qfx Copying the text into a new file produces a file your app rejects
What actually causes it
The server sent the wrong content type
Browsers save or display based on the type the server declares. When a bank labels an OFX file as plain text, the browser helpfully shows it.
Copy-and-paste altered the content
Selecting the rendered text and pasting it into an editor loses the original line endings, can collapse whitespace, and adds the editor's own encoding — three ways to break a file that was fine.
The wrong extension was applied on save
Saving as .txt is harmless in itself, but some importers filter by extension and will not offer the file at all.
How to fix it
- Do not copy the text. Go back and use right-click → "Save link as" on the download link, which saves the original bytes untouched.
- If it has already saved with the wrong extension, simply rename it to .ofx, .qfx or .csv as appropriate — renaming does not alter content.
- Drop the result into the fixer below to confirm it survived intact; a copy-pasted file usually shows structural problems that a properly saved one does not.
- If it was copy-pasted and is damaged, re-download rather than repairing — the original is one click away and always better than a reconstruction.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer identifies the real format regardless of extension, so it can confirm a renamed file is genuinely what you think it is. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer