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About

Excel to CSV

Drop an .xlsx workbook and its first sheet opens as a table; pick another sheet if the one you need is further along. Save it as CSV with the separator and the characters the program reading it expects. Numbers come out as Excel stored them, not rounded as the cells showed them, and dates as 2024-05-12.

What it does

  • The separator starts as your region’s: a semicolon where decimals take a comma, as Excel expects there, and a comma elsewhere.
  • Comma, semicolon, tab or bar can be picked instead, whichever the importing program wants.
  • UTF-8 for Excel starts the file with a byte order mark, so Excel shows ş, é and ü right when it opens it.
  • Plain UTF-8, Windows-1254, Windows-1252 and UTF-16 are there too, and a letter one cannot hold is named instead of saved wrong.
  • A formula comes out as the value Excel last saved for it, and TRUE and FALSE as those words.
  • A date with a time comes out as 2024-05-12 10:30, with the seconds when it has them.
  • Workbooks kept in Excel’s 1904 date system, as old Mac files were, give the right dates as well.
  • Lines end in CRLF, as RFC 4180 has them, and a field is quoted only when it needs it, or always with Quote all.

How to use it

  1. Drop the .xlsx file on the window.
  2. Pick the sheet, if the workbook has more than one.
  3. With Save as on CSV, choose the separator and the characters.
  4. Download the CSV, named after the workbook.

What it does not do

  • .xls files from Excel 97 to 2003: they are refused with a message, to be saved as .xlsx in Excel or LibreOffice first.
  • All the sheets at once: a CSV holds one table, so each sheet is saved on its own.
  • Cell formatting such as currency signs: the value is written as stored, so a cell showing €1,234.50 gives 1234.5.

Questions

Which separator should I choose?

The one the program reading the file expects. Excel takes your region’s list separator, a semicolon in most of Europe and Turkey and a comma in the US and the UK. Databases and scripts usually want a comma, and a tab spares text full of commas from quoting.

Why are some numbers different from what Excel showed?

Because a cell shows its number through a format, and the file stores the number itself: a cell showing €1,234.50 holds 1234.5, and one showing 33% holds 0.33. The CSV takes what is stored, which is what a program reading it needs.

Will the dates stay dates?

They are written as 2024-05-12, which databases and scripts read, and which Excel reads back as a date in any region. Rewrite them as 12.05.2024 or 05/12/2024 with Tidy dates… before saving if the reader insists.

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