I am posting a discussion I had in email with Henry F., with his permission, to preserve it for others to see.
Henry: I need some help with PBE. Under my damage and loss assessment tab, for the components, when I try to save the model to CSV to edit easily, it just gives me a ".file". When I open it in excel, it looks like its just a basic text file, see screenshot below. Is there a fix for this?
Adam: I am almost sure this is because you did not provide a filename that has .csv in it. For example: "components.csv". PBE saves the file properly even without the csv extension, but Excel cannot recognize it. Please try again and provide such a filename.
Henry: I see what you mean. I added .csv to the file name and it can read it correctly in excel.