Excel to CSV Converter

Add one or more workbooks to the box above, choose the sheets, the separator and the encoding, and press the button. Every sheet you pick becomes its own CSV file. One sheet gives you one CSV to download; several sheets or several workbooks come together in one ZIP.

XLSX, XLSM and XLTX files are read in your browser and never leave your device. Older XLS files, XLSB files and OpenDocument ODS files are first turned into XLSX on our server, then deleted at once, and the CSV itself is always written in your browser. You can add up to 50 files at a time, each up to 50 MB.

CSV stands for comma-separated values. It is a plain text file in which every line is one row of a table and the cells of that row are separated by a comma, or by another agreed character such as a semicolon or a tab. Any program can read it: spreadsheets, databases, accounting software, mailing tools, online shops, analytics tools and every programming language.

That simplicity is the reason CSV is still the most common way to move a table from one system to another. A workbook can hold formatting, formulas, charts, pictures and many sheets; a CSV holds just the values of one table. When an upload form, an import screen or a developer asks you for a CSV, they want exactly that: the rows and columns, nothing else.

This is an Excel to CSV converter free of charge, with no sign-up, no watermark, no daily limit and no trial that runs out. You do not need to install anything, and you can convert one batch after another for as long as you like.

Most of the work happens on your own device, so there is no queue to wait in. A workbook of a few thousand rows is usually turned into CSV in about a second; very large sheets with hundreds of thousands of rows take longer and need more memory, especially on older phones.

When you convert XLSX to CSV online here, the file is not sent to us. The page loads a spreadsheet reader into your browser, opens the workbook on your device and writes the CSV there.

The same applies to XLSM files with macros and to XLTX templates. Macros are never run: the tool reads only the stored cell values. For a file you would rather not share with any website, XLSX is the format to use, because nothing about it leaves your computer, phone or tablet.

XLS is the format Excel used before 2007. It is a binary format, and so are XLSB files, the compact binary workbooks newer Excel can save. ODS is the OpenDocument spreadsheet written by LibreOffice and other office suites. These three are harder to read reliably inside a browser, so for them the tool takes a different path.

For an XLS to CSV conversion, the workbook is sent over an encrypted connection to our server, where it is converted to XLSX and then deleted at once. The XLSX comes back to your browser, and from there everything works exactly as for an XLSX file: the sheet list, the preview, all options and the CSV writing happen on your device. No copy of your file or of the result is kept.

A CSV file can hold only one table, so a workbook with several sheets cannot become a single CSV without losing something. The usual answer is one CSV per sheet, and that is what this tool does: Excel to CSV all sheets at once, each named after its workbook and its sheet, for example Sales 2026-January.csv, Sales 2026-February.csv and so on.

With All sheets selected, every visible sheet of every workbook is converted. When the result is more than one file, they are packed into one ZIP, so you download once and unzip once. When there is only one sheet, you get the CSV directly.

Excel can save a CSV itself: File, Save As, then one of the CSV types. But it saves only the active sheet, the one you are looking at. For a workbook of twelve monthly sheets that means clicking through the dialog twelve times, renaming each file by hand and dismissing the warning each time that the other sheets will not be saved.

Excel also decides some things for you. The plain CSV type uses the code page of your Windows region rather than UTF-8, so accents and non-Latin letters can turn into question marks. The separator follows the list separator of your system, which is a semicolon in much of Europe. Numbers are written the way they are displayed, sometimes with thousands separators that the receiving system then reads as text. Leading zeros already stripped by Excel when the data was typed or imported stay stripped.

If you need only some sheets, switch from All sheets to Choose sheets and tick the boxes next to the ones you want. The list shows every sheet of every workbook you added, so you can take the Orders sheet from one file and the Customers sheet from another in the same batch.

Hidden sheets are skipped by default, because they often hold lookup tables, old versions or helper calculations that nobody wants in the export. If you do need them, tick Include hidden sheets and they appear in the list and in the ZIP like any other sheet. Very hidden sheets, the kind that can only be shown with a macro, are treated the same way.

Before you convert, you can open a preview of any sheet. It shows the first rows exactly as they will appear in the CSV, with the separator, the number format and the date format you have chosen, plus the number of rows and columns the sheet contains.

The preview is the quickest way to catch surprises: a header row that is not on row 1, a date column that comes out as numbers, codes that have lost their zeros, or a sheet that is much larger than expected because someone formatted a whole column down to row one million. Change an option and the preview updates, so you can see the effect before you download anything.

Excel to CSV comma delimited is the standard form of the format and the default here. Each cell is separated from the next by a comma, and a cell that itself contains a comma, a quote or a line break is wrapped in double quotes, so the reader knows where it ends. A quote inside a cell is written twice.

Comma is what most upload forms, databases, programming libraries and English-language systems expect when they say CSV. If the receiving system does not say otherwise, choose comma.

One thing to check: if your numbers use a comma as the decimal mark, they cannot sit in a comma-separated file without quotes. In that case either keep the dot as the decimal mark, which is the default, or switch the separator to semicolon.

In countries where the comma is the decimal mark, such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland and Brazil, Excel uses the semicolon as its list separator. A comma-separated file opened there with a double-click lands entirely in column A. Saving Excel to CSV with semicolon solves that, because Excel in those regions splits semicolons into columns on its own.

Choose Semicolon under Separator. If you also want the numbers written with a decimal comma, for example 1234,56 instead of 1234.56, tick Decimal comma under More options. The two belong together: a semicolon file with dots as decimals is fine for most software, while a semicolon file with decimal commas is what a European copy of Excel writes itself.

Tab gives you a tab-separated file, often called TSV. Tabs almost never appear inside normal cell text, so a tab file rarely needs quotes and pastes cleanly into other spreadsheets. Many data and statistics tools read it directly. The file is still saved with the .csv extension; rename it to .tsv or .txt if the receiving system asks for that.

Pipe uses the vertical bar | between cells. It is common in data warehouses, banking and healthcare exports and older mainframe systems, because the character is rare in names and addresses. Use it only when the receiving side asks for it.

The encoding decides how letters are stored as bytes. Plain English letters and digits are stored the same way in every encoding, which is why many files seem fine until a name like José, Müller, Øresund or Łódź appears. The encoding options here are UTF-8 for Excel, UTF-8 without BOM and Windows-1252.

UTF-8 for Excel is the default. It writes Excel to CSV UTF-8 with a byte order mark, three invisible bytes at the very start of the file that tell Excel the text is UTF-8. Without them, Excel on Windows guesses the old code page of your region and shows accented letters as two strange characters. With them, a double-click opens the file with every letter correct, and the file can hold any script: Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, emoji.

UTF-8 without BOM is the same text without the three marker bytes. It is what most databases, programming languages, Linux tools and web services prefer, and a few of them read the BOM as part of the first column name, so a header called id becomes something like id. If the CSV is for software rather than for a person opening it in Excel, this is the safer choice.

Windows-1252, often called ANSI, is the older single-byte code page used by Western European versions of Windows. It can store only about 220 characters: English letters, the common Western accents and a few symbols. Some older accounting and banking programs still require it. Any character it cannot hold is written as a question mark, and the tool tells you how many characters were replaced, so you know whether the result is safe to use.

If you have ever opened a CSV and seen é where é should be, or ü instead of ü, the file was UTF-8 and the program read it as Windows-1252. In UTF-8 the letter é takes two bytes; read one byte at a time with the old code page, those two bytes show up as two separate characters. Nothing is lost: the file is fine, it is only being read with the wrong key.

The other way round looks different. A Windows-1252 file read as UTF-8 shows a replacement symbol, often a diamond with a question mark, in place of each accented letter. And a file that already contains real question marks where letters should be was saved in an encoding that could not hold those letters, so the letters are gone and have to be exported again.

ZIP codes such as 02134, phone numbers such as 0049 30 123456, product codes, employee numbers, bank sort codes and account IDs often start with zero. Excel tends to treat them as numbers and drop the zero, and many people go looking for a way to save Excel to CSV without losing leading zeros after it has happened once too often.

The first thing to know is that the CSV written here always keeps what is in the cell. If a cell is stored as text, such as 00123 typed after an apostrophe or imported as text, the CSV contains 00123. If a cell holds the number 123 with a custom number format of 00000, the default As shown in Excel setting writes 00123, because that is what the cell displays. Zero padding from a number format is kept; it is not thrown away the way a plain number export would.

The second thing is that the zeros are usually lost later, when the CSV is opened again in Excel with a double-click. Excel looks at 00123, decides it is a number and shows 123. The CSV itself is correct, but the person opening it sees the wrong value, and if they save it again the zero is gone for good.

For that case there is Keep leading zeros when the CSV is opened in Excel under More options. It writes such values as ="00123", a small formula Excel shows as the text 00123, zero included. Use it only for files that people will open in Excel. Databases, scripts and import screens will read the equals sign and the quotes literally, so for them leave it off; the plain CSV already holds 00123.

Under Numbers you choose between As shown in Excel and Full precision. As shown in Excel writes each number the way its cell displays it: the same number of decimals, percentages as 12.5% and zero padding such as 00123. Thousands separators are never written, because a value like 1,234,567 would break a comma-separated file and is read as text by most systems.

Full precision writes the number as it is stored, with all its decimals and no formatting: 0.125 instead of 12.5%, 3.14159265358979 instead of 3.14. Choose it when the CSV goes into a database, a calculation or a program, where the stored value matters more than how it looked on screen.

Currency symbols from number formats are not written in either mode, so a cell showing $1,250.00 becomes 1250.00 or 1250. This keeps the column numeric for the system that reads it. If you need the symbol, put it in a separate column or in the header.

Inside a workbook a date is just a number, the count of days since the start of 1900, with a format that turns it into something readable. A CSV has no formats, so the date has to be written out as text. Under Dates you choose how: 2026-10-15, 15/10/2026 or 10/15/2026.

2026-10-15, the ISO format, is the default and the safest choice for software. It is read the same way in every country, it sorts correctly as plain text, and databases accept it directly. 15/10/2026 is the day-first style used in the UK, Europe, India, Australia and most of the world; 10/15/2026 is the month-first style used in the United States.

Times are written as 14:30 or 14:30:15, and a cell with both a date and a time gets both. Durations formatted as [h]:mm, such as 37:45 for thirty-seven hours, are written as total hours, minutes and seconds, such as 37:45:00, rather than being wrapped into a date. Workbooks that use the 1904 date system, a setting found in some files made on older Macs, are detected and their dates come out right instead of four years off.

A cell with a formula is written as the value that formula last calculated, the result you see in Excel. The formula itself is not exported, because a CSV has no place for it and the receiving system would not run it. If a workbook was saved by a program that did not store calculated results, those cells come out empty; open the file in Excel, let it calculate and save it once to fix that.

Merged cells are stored in a workbook as one value in the top-left cell and empty cells beside or below it. By default the CSV mirrors that: the value appears once. Tick Repeat the value in every merged cell and it is copied into every cell of the merged area, which is what you want when a merged region label such as North should apply to every row beneath it. Empty rows and columns at the end of a sheet are trimmed, so a sheet once formatted down to its last row does not produce a million blank lines.

Quotes only when needed is the default and the standard form. A cell is wrapped in double quotes only if it contains the separator, a double quote or a line break. Every field wraps every cell in quotes, which a few strict import tools ask for and which does no harm elsewhere.

Line endings can be Windows CRLF, the default, or Mac/Linux LF. Excel, most Windows software and most web forms read both. Choose LF when a Unix tool, a script or a version-control system expects it.

You can add up to 50 workbooks in one batch and turn multiple Excel files to CSV with one click. Each sheet of each file becomes its own CSV named after its workbook and sheet, and everything is collected into one ZIP. The same settings apply to every file, so a whole folder of monthly reports comes out with the same separator, encoding and date format.

You can mix formats in one batch: XLSX files are read locally, while XLS, XLSB and ODS files make the short trip through our server first. If one file is password-protected or damaged, the others are still converted, and the tool tells you which file could not be read.

There is nothing to install for Excel to CSV online free of charge on any device. The tool runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, and in the browser on iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets.

On a phone you can pick a workbook from your files, from cloud storage or from an email attachment, convert it and save the CSV back to your files or share it straight to another app. You do not need Excel or any other spreadsheet program on the device for this.

CSV stores values and nothing else. Fonts, colours, borders, column widths, conditional formatting, comments, data validation, charts, pictures, shapes, pivot table layouts, filters and frozen panes are not part of the file. Formulas are replaced by their results. Several sheets cannot share one CSV, which is why every sheet becomes its own file.

If you need to keep the look of a sheet, CSV is the wrong format: Excel to PDF keeps the layout for reading and printing. If you need to keep formulas, send the workbook itself. CSV is the right choice when another program needs the data.

Workbooks protected with a password to open are encrypted, and the tool cannot read them. Open the file in Excel with the password, remove it under File, Info, Protect Workbook, Encrypt with Password, save, and add the unlocked copy. The tool does not try to guess or break passwords.

Put one header row on row 1 of each sheet and keep the data directly under it, with no title rows, notes or totals above the table. Most import screens treat the first line of the CSV as the column names.

Give each sheet a short, clear name before converting, because the sheet name becomes part of the CSV file name.

Store codes, IDs, phone numbers and ZIP codes as text in the workbook. Then they are correct in every CSV, whatever the settings.

Use the preview to check one sheet before converting a large batch. It is quicker than opening a dozen files afterwards.

XLSX, XLSM and XLTX workbooks are never uploaded. They are opened and converted by your browser, on your device, and the CSV files are created there too.

XLS, XLSB and ODS files are sent over an encrypted connection to our server only to be turned into XLSX. The uploaded file and the converted copy are deleted as soon as the XLSX has been sent back, and nothing is kept, logged or looked at. We do not ask for an account or an email address.

The page loads a spreadsheet reader written in JavaScript. It opens the workbook, lists its sheets, reads every cell with its stored value and its number format, and then writes the text of the CSV using the separator, quoting, encoding and line endings you picked. For the formats that need it, a converter on our server turns the file into XLSX first.

To go the other way and make a formatted workbook from a CSV, use CSV to Excel. To build a JSON file for an app or an API, use CSV to JSON; to put JSON data back into a spreadsheet, there is JSON to Excel. CSV to SQL turns your rows into INSERT statements for a database.

For sharing and printing, Excel to PDF keeps the layout of a sheet, Excel to JPG makes a picture of it, and CSV to PDF prints a CSV as a clean table. PDF to Excel pulls tables out of PDF files. You will find more in Office Tools and Data Tools.