How it works
The Excel to CSV converter exports a .xlsx spreadsheet to a plain-text CSV (comma-separated values) file. CSV is the universal data interchange format — accepted by every programming language, database, data analysis tool, and platform. Use it to extract Excel data for import into a database, processing in Python/R, upload to a web platform, or sharing with systems that don't have Excel.
CSV is the lowest common denominator for tabular data. Any system that handles structured data — MySQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, Pandas, R's read.csv() — accepts CSV. The Excel .xlsx format requires Excel or Office-compatible software to read programmatically.
How to use it: upload a .xlsx file. Select the sheet to export (multi-sheet workbooks let you choose which sheet). Configure the delimiter (comma, semicolon for European locales, tab for TSV), quote character, and header row behavior. Click Export and Download the .csv file.
Date and number formatting: Excel stores dates as serial numbers internally. The converter formats dates as YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601) by default, or in the cell's original display format. Numbers are exported as their display value or raw numeric value — toggle the option based on your use case.
Unicode: the CSV is exported as UTF-8 with BOM (byte order mark), which ensures Excel re-imports it with correct accented character encoding.
Privacy: Excel parsing runs in the browser using SheetJS.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The CSV is exported as UTF-8 with BOM. If Excel shows garbled characters when you open the CSV, it's because Excel on some systems defaults to ANSI/Latin-1 encoding. Open the CSV via Data → Get Data → From Text/CSV and specify UTF-8 encoding in the wizard, rather than double-clicking the file.
- By default, dates are exported in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) for maximum interoperability. Toggle 'Use cell display format' to export dates as they appear in Excel (e.g., '01/15/2025'). ISO format is recommended for database imports and programmatic processing.
- Yes. Specify the cell range to export (e.g., A1:F100) in the Range field. Only that range is exported to CSV. This is useful when the sheet contains auxiliary data (charts, notes) that shouldn't be in the CSV.
- European countries that use a comma as a decimal separator (e.g., 1.234,56 for a thousand-and-a-half) use a semicolon as the CSV delimiter. Select 'Semicolon' if your target system is in a country that uses comma as the decimal mark.