CSV Viewer

How to view a CSV file online

A CSV is plain text, so the hard part is not opening it — it is seeing it as a table without anything rewriting the contents on the way in. This viewer runs in your browser and only draws the file; it never alters a single value. Three steps:

1. Paste or upload. Drop your rows into the input box, or click Upload to pick a .csv or .txt file up to 10 MB. Sample loads an example if you just want to see how it behaves.
2. Set the delimiter. Comma, semicolon, tab or pipe. Tick First row as header if line one names the columns rather than holding data.
3. Preview. The table appears with row and column counts, the file size and the delimiter in use. Live Preview keeps it updating as you type.

When the whole file lands in one column

This is almost always the delimiter. Much of Europe uses the comma as a decimal separator, so spreadsheet software there writes semicolons between fields instead — the file still ends in .csv and still has no commas in it. Tab-separated exports are common too. Change the delimiter and the columns snap into place; it is the first thing to try, not the last.

Reading a file without changing it

Open the same file in a spreadsheet and it is imported rather than opened: a type is guessed for every cell and the cell is rewritten to match. Leading zeros disappear from postcodes, long account numbers turn into scientific notation, and product codes that look like dates become dates. Here 007 stays 007, because the table is only a view of the text. If you want the whole story, see What Is a CSV File? And What Excel Does to It.

Searching and checking the shape of a file

The search box highlights matching cells across every column, which is the quickest way to confirm a particular record made it into an export. The row and column counts are worth a glance too: a column count that is higher than you expected usually means a field containing a comma was never wrapped in quotes, which silently shifts every value after it on that row. The CSV Validator finds those rows for you, and the CSV Formatter tidies inconsistent quoting.

Taking the data with you

Copy puts the CSV on your clipboard, Download saves it as data.csv, and JSON converts the table to an array of objects and saves data.json — useful when the next step is an API or a script. For a real spreadsheet file there is CSV to Excel, and for very large files the CSV Splitter breaks them into pieces small enough to work with.