Excel to CSV

This free Excel to CSV converter turns an .xlsx or .xls workbook into a .csv file entirely in your browser. Drop the file in, pick the worksheet you actually want, check the preview, and download. There is no sign-up, no queue, and your file never leaves your device.

Converting Excel to CSV sounds like the easy direction, and that is exactly why it goes wrong quietly. A workbook has several worksheets, but CSV holds one table; a workbook knows that 007 is text and 128.50 is money, but CSV carries no type at all; and the same Chinese text opens perfectly in Google Sheets and comes out as gibberish in Excel, depending on three invisible bytes at the start of the file. This page makes every one of those decisions visible before you download.

How to use this Excel to CSV converter

• Drop an .xlsx or .xls file on the box, or click it to choose one. No file handy? Use load a sample workbook — it is generated in your browser so you can see the whole flow first.
• Pick the Worksheet. If the workbook has more than one sheet, the note under the preview tells you how many there are and which one you are exporting — nothing is silently taken from the first sheet.
• Choose the Delimiter. Comma is the default; use semicolon if your regional settings use a comma as the decimal separator, and tab or pipe when a downstream tool expects them.
• Choose the Encoding. This is the one that bites people — the next section explains the difference between the two UTF-8 options in plain terms.
• Click Convert to CSV, read the note under the preview, then Download .csv. The file name carries a timestamp, so repeated exports never overwrite each other.

Output encoding: the BOM, and why your Chinese turns into garbage

A byte-order mark is three bytes — EF BB BF — written at the very start of a file. UTF-8 does not need one: the byte order of UTF-8 is fixed by definition. Excel, however, uses its presence as a hint. On Windows, when you double-click a .csv, Excel decides how to decode it, and without a BOM it falls back to the machine's legacy code page — Windows-1252 on a US or UK install, GBK on a Chinese one. That is why the same file shows 上海 correctly in Google Sheets and Notepad but arrives in Excel as 涓婃捣 or a row of question marks. It is not corruption: it is Excel reading UTF-8 bytes through the wrong code page.

One honest limit: browsers can only encode Unicode themselves, so this page offers UTF-8 and UTF-16 output. It does not write GBK, Big5 or Shift_JIS, because shipping a legacy code-page table would mean bundling a large mapping into a page that is supposed to load fast and work offline. If you truly need a legacy code page, export UTF-8 with BOM here and use Save As inside Excel to pick the code page.

What this tool supports

Worksheets

CSV is a single table, so one worksheet is exported at a time. When the workbook has more than one sheet, the picker lists every sheet with its row count and the note under the preview states how many sheets were found — the first sheet is only used because you have not picked another one yet, and it says so. Empty sheets and sheets that are nothing but formatting produce an empty result rather than a fake header.

Delimiters

Comma, semicolon, tab and pipe, plus any single custom character. Fields containing the delimiter, a double quote or a line break are quoted automatically, and a quote inside a field is doubled, so the file stays parseable by Excel and by every CSV library. Choose CRLF for Windows and Excel, LF for Unix, macOS and most repositories.

Headers

With First row is header on, the first row of the worksheet is written as the header line. Turn it off and the tool writes generated names — Column 1, Column 2 and so on — and keeps every worksheet row as data, which is what you want for exports that have no header row.

Leading zeros and long ID numbers

By default, values are written as displayed in the file: this tool takes the text Excel itself was showing in the cell, so a zip code stored as text stays 01234, an extension stored as the number 7 with the format 000 comes out as 007, and a 16-digit card number is not rounded into 1.23457E+15. Set Values to Raw stored values if you want the underlying numbers instead, including Excel date serials.

There is a second trap behind that one. CSV carries no type information at all, so when you open the downloaded file, Excel re-reads those digits and may turn 007 back into 7. Nothing in the file changed — the CSV still says 007. To survive the reopen, switch Leading zeros to Protect in Excel: affected values are written as ="007", which Excel evaluates to the text 007. Use it when the CSV is going to be double-clicked in Excel; leave it off when a script or a database is the next reader, because they will see the formula text literally.

Dates

Dates are not reformatted and not guessed. 03/04/2026 is 3 April in one country and 4 March in another, and no converter can know which one you meant, so this tool writes the date exactly as the workbook displayed it — that is Excel's own formatting, not a guess made here. If the dates look wrong in the CSV, they were formatted that way in the workbook: change the cell format in Excel and export again. With Values set to raw, a date becomes the serial number Excel stores, such as 46085.

Formulas, merged cells and everything CSV cannot hold

Formula cells are exported as their last saved result, the value Excel cached in the file — this page does not recalculate a workbook. Only the top-left cell of a merged range holds a value; the rest come out empty. Cell colours, comments, images, charts, conditional formatting and data validation are dropped, because CSV is plain text and has nowhere to put them.

Privacy

The file is read with the browser's own file reader and converted in the page. There is no upload endpoint, no account, and no stored history. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it will still work.

Limits

• Encrypted or password-protected workbooks cannot be read. There is no password prompt, and the error says so.
• The .xlsx format holds at most 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet; the older .xls holds 65,536 rows and 256 columns. Those are the formats' ceilings, not this tool's.
• Very large workbooks are limited by your device's memory, since the conversion happens in the browser rather than on a server. A few hundred thousand rows is normally fine.
• One worksheet per CSV. Workbook-wide exports that stack several sheets into one file are not what CSV is, so this page does not fake it.
• Output encoding is UTF-8 or UTF-16 only, for the reason given above.

FAQ