CSV to Excel Converter

To turn a CSV file into a spreadsheet, add the file to the box above or paste the text, check the preview and press Convert to Excel. You get a real .xlsx workbook with a bold header row, filter buttons, sized columns and numbers you can add up. Several files can go into one workbook at once.

Everything happens in your browser, so your data is not uploaded. The separator and the text encoding are found for you. Phone numbers, PIN codes and long IDs keep their leading zeros and every digit. It is the clean result you hoped for when you double-clicked the CSV and Excel mangled it.

CSV means comma-separated values. It is a plain text file where each line is a row and a comma, semicolon or tab marks where one column ends and the next begins. Almost every program can export it: banks, shops, CRMs, survey tools, databases, sensors and accounting apps. That makes CSV great for moving data, but poor for reading and working with it.

An Excel workbook is made for people. It has real numbers you can sum and sort, a header you can freeze, filters, column widths, several sheets and formatting that stays put. A CSV has none of that. Every time you open it, the program has to guess what each value means, and the guesses are often wrong.

Converting once gives you a file that opens the same way every time, on every computer. You can send it to a colleague, attach it to a report, or keep working on it without the data changing under you.

This is a CSV to Excel converter free for everyone. There is no sign-up, no email, no watermark, no daily limit and no paid version hiding the useful settings. All options on this page are available to every visitor.

It can stay free because the work is done by your own device. Your browser reads the CSV and builds the Excel file, so we do not pay for servers to process your data. That is also why it is fast: nothing has to travel over the internet and back.

Free does not mean basic here. You get automatic separator and encoding detection, safe handling of IDs and phone numbers, a frozen and filterable header, sized columns, a preview, several files at once and a choice between one workbook or many.

CSV to XLSX is the most common way to say it: XLSX is the modern Excel file format, used since Excel 2007. The file you download is a genuine .xlsx workbook, not a CSV with a new name. It opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice Calc.

Inside the workbook, numbers are stored as numbers and text as text. Text cells use the Text format, so Excel does not try to re-read them later and change a code like 00123 into 123. The header row has its own bold style with a light blue fill.

Very long cells are cut at 32,767 characters, which is the most one Excel cell can hold. Sheet names follow Excel rules too: at most 31 characters, without the characters Excel does not allow, and never twice the same name in one workbook.

Getting CSV to Excel without losing leading zeros is the main reason many people look for a converter. When you double-click a CSV, Excel treats anything that looks like a number as a number. A phone number 09876543210 becomes 9876543210, a ZIP code 02134 becomes 2134 and an employee ID 000781 becomes 781. The zeros are gone for good once you save.

Long numbers suffer too. Excel keeps only 15 significant digits, so a 16-digit card reference or a 19-digit order ID turns into something like 1.23457E+18, and the last digits become zeros. A value with a plus sign, such as +919876543210, loses its plus.

This converter checks every value before it becomes a number. Values with a leading zero, values with more than 15 digits and values that start with a + sign stay exactly as written, stored as text. Everything else that is a plain number becomes a real Excel number. The option Keep leading zeros is on by default; switch it off only if your zeros really mean nothing.

Text encoding decides how letters are stored as bytes. A CSV to Excel UTF-8 conversion keeps accents, umlauts, the euro sign and scripts such as Hindi, Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic exactly as they are. If you have ever seen café turn into café, that was a UTF-8 file read with the wrong encoding.

With Encoding set to Auto, the converter looks for a byte order mark (BOM) first. If there is none, it checks whether the file is valid UTF-8. If it is not, the file is read as Windows ANSI (Windows-1252), the older encoding many Windows programs still use for Western European text. Files saved as UTF-16 with a BOM are recognised too.

If letters still look wrong in the preview, open More options and pick UTF-8 or Windows (ANSI) by hand. The preview updates at once, so you can see which one is right before you convert. In the Excel file, all text is stored as Unicode, so it shows correctly everywhere.

For a CSV to Excel table that is ready to work with, the first row becomes a proper header. It is bold, has a light blue fill and is frozen, so it stays visible while you scroll down. Every header cell has a filter button, so you can sort and filter the data straight away.

To be exact: the result is a normal range with filters, not a formatted Excel Table object. That keeps the file simple and works in every spreadsheet app. If you want the banded rows and structured references of a real Excel Table, click any cell in Excel and press Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on a Mac). It takes one second.

If your CSV has no header row, untick First row is the header. The first line is then treated as normal data: no bold row, no freeze and no filter buttons.

A CSV to Excel with columns conversion puts every value in its own cell. This is the most common problem with opening a CSV directly: all the data lands in column A, as one long line per row with commas or semicolons in it. That happens when the separator in the file does not match what your computer expects.

Here the separator is detected from the first lines of the file, and each value goes into its own column. The file list shows the result, for example 1,200 rows · 8 columns · Separator: semicolon, so you can see at a glance that the columns are right.

Column widths are set for you. Each column is made wide enough for its longest value, with a sensible maximum so one long comment does not make a column fill the whole screen. You do not have to double-click every column border after opening the file.

This page is a way to convert CSV to Excel online free, with nothing to install. It works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and other modern browsers on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, Android and iPhone. You do not need Excel on the device to make the file.

Online usually means your file goes to someone else's server. Not here. After the page has loaded, the conversion runs entirely in your browser. The CSV stays on your device, which matters for customer lists, payroll exports, bank statements and anything with personal data.

Your settings are remembered in your browser for next time, so if you always work with semicolon files or always want text-only output, you set it once.

A semicolon CSV to Excel conversion is needed more often than you might think. In many countries, such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil and the Netherlands, the comma is the decimal mark. So programs there export CSV files with a semicolon between the columns instead.

Excel uses the list separator from your computer's regional settings. Open a semicolon file on a computer set to comma, or the other way round, and everything ends up in one column. With Separator on Auto, this converter checks comma, semicolon, tab and pipe and picks the one that gives the same number of columns on each line.

You can also choose the separator yourself. Tab is used by TSV files and by data copied from a spreadsheet. The pipe character | appears in exports from databases and older business systems.

You do not always need a file. If the data is in an email, a chat, a web page or another spreadsheet, copy it and paste it into the text box next to the file button. The preview appears as soon as you paste.

Data copied from a spreadsheet or an HTML table usually comes with tabs between the columns. Auto finds the tab, so every value still lands in its own column. Text from an email or a log file often uses commas or semicolons, which are found the same way.

Pasted text is handled exactly like a file. It gets the same number checks, the same header and the same filters, and it becomes a workbook named pasted.xlsx. You can paste text and add files at the same time; the pasted data then counts as one more file.

To combine multiple CSV to one Excel workbook, add all the files at once. When you add more than one file, a Files setting appears. Choose One workbook, one sheet per file, and each CSV becomes its own sheet named after the file. This is handy for monthly exports, one file per branch or one file per sensor.

Choose One workbook per file instead and every CSV becomes its own .xlsx file. With several results you can download them all together in one ZIP, or save them one by one from the list.

You can add up to 30 files of up to 50 MB each. Each file is checked separately, so a file with a different separator or encoding is still read correctly. The rows are not merged into one long sheet; each file keeps its own sheet, header and filters.

A value becomes an Excel number only when it is a plain number: digits, an optional minus sign at the start, an optional decimal point and an optional exponent such as 1.5E3. Values like 42, -7, 3.14 and 0.5 become numbers you can add up, sort and use in formulas.

Everything else stays text, exactly as written: 1,234 with a thousands comma, 3,5 with a decimal comma, $20, 15%, numbers with spaces inside, and of course names, codes and notes. You can change a text column into numbers in Excel later if you need to.

Dates are kept as text exactly as written. There is no automatic date conversion. That is deliberate: 03/04/2025 means 3 April in one country and March 4 in another, and Excel's guesses turn codes like 1-2 or MARCH1 into dates you never wanted. If you need real Excel dates, select the column in Excel and use Data, Text to Columns, choose Date and the right order (for example DMY).

If you want no conversion at all, open More options and turn off Number detection. Then every value is stored as text, character for character. That is a good choice for files full of codes, for example product codes like 12E5 that would otherwise be read as a number in scientific notation.

Real CSV files are messier than a simple list of commas. An address like 12 Park Road, Pune contains a comma. A product description can contain line breaks. To keep such values together, CSV puts them between double quotes, and a quote inside a value is written twice.

The converter reads CSV the way the standard (RFC 4180) describes it. Commas, semicolons and line breaks inside quotes stay part of the value. Doubled quotes become one quote. A value with a line break stays in one cell; turn on Wrap Text in Excel to see both lines.

Values that start with an equals sign, such as =SUM(A1:A3) or =HYPERLINK(...), are stored as plain text. They are shown as written and never run as formulas, which also protects you from harmful formulas hidden in CSV files from unknown sources.

Each file can be up to 50 MB, and you can add up to 30 files at a time. Pasted text has no fixed limit, but very long pastes are easier to handle as a file.

An Excel sheet can hold at most 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. That is a limit of Excel itself, not of this page. If a file has more, the converter tells you which file it is instead of making a broken workbook. Split the CSV into parts first, or keep the data in a database.

Large files are read in your browser's memory. A 50 MB CSV works well on a laptop or desktop. On an older phone, very big files can be slow, so for those a computer is the better choice.

Your CSV is not uploaded. The file is read by your browser, the Excel workbook is built by your browser and the download is saved straight from your browser. No copy of your data reaches our server, and there is nothing to delete afterwards.

You can check this yourself: once the page has loaded, disconnect from the internet and convert a file. It still works. This matters for data protection rules such as GDPR, and for company policies that do not allow customer data to be sent to unknown websites.

The page does not need an account, does not ask for your email and does not add anything to your file. What you download is only your data, in Excel format.

When you add a file, the browser reads its bytes and works out the text encoding. The first lines are then used to find the separator. A CSV reader that follows RFC 4180 splits the text into rows and values, taking care of quotes and line breaks.

Each value is then checked. Plain numbers become numbers, and values that would lose something as a number, like leading zeros or long digits, stay text. The workbook is written as Office Open XML, the format behind every .xlsx file, and packed into a single file in your browser.

The result has one sheet per file, a bold frozen header with filters, column widths based on the longest values and cells stored with the right type. It is the same file format Excel itself saves.

Both formats hold a table, but they are made for different jobs. A CSV is a simple, open format that any program can write and read, which is why exports use it. An XLSX workbook is richer: it remembers which values are numbers, how the header looks and how wide each column is.

Keep the CSV if another program needs to import it. Use the workbook when people need to read it, filter it, add formulas or send it on. You can always go back with Excel to CSV.

Excel can also import a CSV with full control. In Excel for Windows, go to the Data tab, choose From Text/CSV, pick the file and set File Origin (the encoding) and Delimiter in the preview. To keep leading zeros, choose Transform Data and set each ID column to Text before you load it. Excel for Mac has a similar import under the Data tab.

This works well, but it takes several steps every time, and it is easy to forget one column. It also needs Excel on the device. The converter on this page makes those choices for every column at once and gives you a finished .xlsx that anyone can open without repeating the import.

Google Sheets has File, Import, where you can choose the separator and untick Convert text to numbers, dates and formulas. LibreOffice Calc shows a Text Import dialog with the character set, separator and a column type for each column. Both are good tools, and the result of this page opens in both of them too.

Most apps that offer an export let you choose CSV. If you can also pick the encoding, choose UTF-8. If you can pick the separator, any of the four common ones is fine, because the converter finds it on its own.

If an export offers a choice between an Excel file and a CSV, the Excel file is not always the better choice. Some apps make an Excel file in which IDs have already lost their zeros. A CSV holds the raw values, and this page decides carefully what becomes a number.

Do not open and save the CSV in Excel before converting it. Saving from Excel can already remove leading zeros, round long numbers and change dates. Convert the file just as it came from the app.

Always glance at the preview before you convert. Numbers are aligned right and text is aligned left, so you can see at once whether amounts became numbers and whether IDs stayed text.

Keep the original CSV until you have checked the workbook. If something looks off, change a setting and convert again; it only takes a moment.

If you copy data out of a web page or another spreadsheet, paste it into the text box. Copied cells are separated by tabs, and the converter finds that automatically.

For files you will import into another system later, consider turning off Number detection. Text cells keep every value exactly, so nothing changes on the way.

Before you send the workbook on, a quick check is worth it. Look at the number of rows in the file list and compare it with what you expected. The header row is not counted, so 1,200 rows means 1,200 lines of data.

Scroll through the preview. Numbers are aligned to the right and text to the left. If an amount column is on the left, it stayed text, usually because of a currency sign or a decimal comma. If an ID column is on the right, it became a number; turn on Keep leading zeros or turn off Number detection if that is not what you want.

In Excel, select a number column and look at the status bar at the bottom. It shows the Sum and the Count. If the Sum is missing, the column is text. That takes two seconds and saves surprises later.

Once the workbook is open, a few Excel steps are often useful. Click the empty cell under a number column and press Alt+= (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac) to add a SUM. Use the filter buttons in the header to show only one payee, one city or one status.

To get a formatted Excel Table with banded rows, click inside the data and press Ctrl+T. To summarise the data, choose Insert, PivotTable. To turn text dates into real dates, select the column and use Data, Text to Columns, then choose Date and the order of day, month and year.

If a column of amounts used a decimal comma or a currency sign and stayed text, use Find and Replace to remove the sign or swap the comma, or use the VALUE or NUMBERVALUE function. NUMBERVALUE lets you say which character is the decimal separator.

A workbook is easier to share than a CSV. When a colleague opens your .xlsx, they see the same columns, the same numbers and the same text that you saw, with the header already bold and frozen. Nobody has to know about separators or encodings.

The file is often smaller than the CSV too, because an .xlsx is compressed inside. That helps when you attach it to an email or upload it to a shared drive. It opens in Microsoft 365 online, Google Drive and OneDrive previews as well.

If people only need to look at the data and not change it, you can turn the sheet into a PDF with Excel to PDF, or into a picture for a chat or a slide with Excel to JPG.

Sometimes the CSV is still the right file to keep. If you will import the data into another system, a website, a database or an accounting app, that system most likely expects CSV. Send it the original, not a workbook.

Keep both if you are not sure. The workbook is for people and the CSV is for machines. Converting does not change or replace the original file on your device; you simply get an extra .xlsx next to it.

The page works with the keyboard alone. Tab to the file box and press Enter or Space to open the file picker. Every setting is a normal button or checkbox that you can reach with Tab.

Press Ctrl+Enter, or Cmd+Enter on a Mac, to convert when the cursor is not in the text box. Screen readers announce when files are added and when the Excel file is ready.

Need to go the other way? Excel to CSV saves a sheet as a clean CSV with the encoding and separator you choose. Have data in JSON? JSON to Excel turns it into a workbook in the same way, and CSV to JSON makes JSON from a CSV for developers.

To share a finished sheet as a fixed document, Excel to PDF makes a print-ready PDF, and Excel to JPG makes an image for chats and slides. If your data is stuck in a PDF, PDF to Excel pulls the tables out. You will find all of them in Data Tools.