Importing Structure and Data - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 138

Exporting a Test File
Before trying an import, let's generate an author.csv export file from the author
table. We use the default values in the CSV export options. We can then Empty
the author table—we should avoid dropping this table because we still need the
table structure.
CSV
From the author table menu, we select Import , and then CSV .
We can influence the behavior of the import in a number of ways. By default,
importing does not modify existing data (based on primary or unique keys), but
the Replace table data with file option instructs phpMyAdmin to use REPLACE
statements instead of INSERT; statement so that existing rows are replaced with the
imported data.