Excel to CSV Converter
Convert an Excel (.xlsx) file to CSV format. The file is processed entirely in your browser and is never sent to a server.
What Excel to CSV Conversion Is
Converting Excel to CSV means taking the tabular data in a sheet of an Excel (.xlsx) workbook and turning it into CSV, a plain-text format that separates values with commas. Because this tool reads the Excel file directly inside your browser, there's no need to open Excel and go through "Save As" to pick the CSV format — simply choosing the file is enough to produce the conversion.
The outcome depends on a few choices: which sheet to convert, which delimiter to use (comma or tab), and how the character encoding is handled. This tool supports workbooks with multiple sheets, letting you convert only the one you need, and it always writes UTF-8 with a byte-order mark so the file opens correctly, without garbled characters, in Windows Excel.
How to Convert Excel to CSV
- Select your Excel file Choose the .xlsx file you want to convert from the file picker. Everything is processed in your browser, so the file is never sent to a server.
- Pick the sheet to convert If the workbook has more than one sheet, choose the one you want from the dropdown menu. Only that sheet is converted to CSV.
- Choose the delimiter Select comma-separated or tab-separated, depending on what the system that will import the data expects.
- Check the conversion result The content of the selected sheet is converted automatically, and a preview appears on screen.
- Download the CSV file Click "Download CSV File" to save the result as a UTF-8 (with BOM) CSV file.
Tips for getting more out of it
- The generated CSV includes a UTF-8 byte-order mark (BOM) at the start, so it won't display garbled characters when opened in Windows Excel.
- If the Excel file contains multiple sheets, you can pick which one to convert from the dropdown menu. Only the selected sheet is converted to CSV.
- Excel formulas and cell formatting (colors, borders, fonts, etc.) aren't preserved in the CSV output — CSV is a plain-text format that only stores computed values.
- The file is processed entirely in your browser (client-side) and is never uploaded to a server, so it's safe to use even with sensitive data.
When Excel to CSV Conversion Comes in Handy
Importing data into accounting or sales-management systems
Many business systems accept CSV for data import, so ledgers or inventory lists built in Excel can be converted straight into the format those systems expect.
Analyzing and aggregating data with code
Languages like Python and R work with CSV far more easily than with Excel files, so data you receive in Excel can be quickly turned into something a script can process.
Exchanging data with partners or other teams
When the other side doesn't use Excel, or when systems need to talk to each other, CSV's wide compatibility makes it the natural format to hand data over in.
Bulk-registering large amounts of data
Web services commonly offer a bulk CSV import feature in their admin screens, and data organized in Excel can be fed straight into it.
Terms Used Here
- CSV
- Short for Comma-Separated Values, a plain-text format that represents tabular data by separating values with commas. It is supported as an import/export format by a huge range of software and systems.
- xlsx
- The default file format used by Excel 2007 and later. Internally it is a ZIP archive containing a set of XML files that store the sheets, formatting, and formulas.
- BOM (byte-order mark)
- A few bytes placed at the start of a text file to tell an application that the encoding is UTF-8. It is what lets Windows Excel open a UTF-8 CSV correctly.
- Delimiter
- The character used to separate one value from the next in a CSV file. Comma is the standard choice, but tab is sometimes used instead when the data itself contains commas.
- Character encoding
- The rule that determines how characters are represented as bits on a computer. Excel on Japanese Windows defaults to Shift-JIS, but this tool always outputs UTF-8.
- Sheet
- One self-contained page of a spreadsheet within a single Excel file (workbook). Since CSV has no concept beyond a single table, you need to pick one sheet when converting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Side Note — Why CSV Went So Long Without an Official Standard
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) has been in use since the 1970s, but surprisingly, a formal specification wasn't established until 2005, when RFC 4180 became the first official reference. For decades before that, CSV was little more than a loosely shared convention, and details like the delimiter character, quoting rules, and line-ending style varied subtly from one piece of software to another, producing a whole family of incompatible "dialects."
Those dialect differences haven't fully gone away even today. Excel, depending on regional settings, sometimes uses a semicolon instead of a comma as the delimiter (since a comma would clash with its use as the decimal separator in many locales), and the default character encoding differs between the Windows and Mac versions of Excel — so files sharing the same ".csv" name can still behave subtly differently depending on where they came from. This tool generates CSV that complies with RFC 4180, including proper double-quote escaping, so its output is broadly compatible with spreadsheet applications and database tools alike.
On the encoding side, Excel on Japanese Windows tends to save CSV files as Shift-JIS, while Google Sheets and Mac Excel tend to lean toward UTF-8. This tool always outputs UTF-8 with a BOM when converting Excel to CSV, so the result opens correctly in Windows Excel without garbled characters.