Convert CSV to Excel Free
Upload a .csv, .tsv, or .txt file. We auto-detect the delimiter (comma, semicolon, tab, pipe) and produce a clean .xlsx. Leading zeros survive the round-trip — your product codes and ZIP codes won't get mangled.
What happens when you convert CSV to Excel
CSV files are plain text — no formatting, no data types, no multiple sheets. Excel (.xlsx) adds structure: each column gets a type (text, number, date), each cell can have formatting, and a single file can hold many sheets.
Our converter reads your CSV line by line, detects the delimiter automatically, and writes an XLSX where every cell is stored as text by default. That means 00123 stays as 00123 rather than becoming 123. If you need numeric columns for formulas, change the cell format in Excel after opening — the converter gives you the raw data intact.
Delimiter auto-detection
The converter scans the first few rows and picks the delimiter that produces the most consistent column count. Supported delimiters:
Comma (,)
Name,Email,Phone
Most common — English/US exports
Semicolon (;)
Name;Email;Phone
Default in many European locales
Tab (\t)
Name→Email→Phone
TSV files, copy-paste from spreadsheets
Pipe (|)
Name|Email|Phone
Common in database exports, log files
Encoding — why your characters break and how we fix it
The most common CSV headache
Someone sends you a CSV with Cyrillic names and they show up as Каталог in Excel. This is almost always a UTF-8 file opened by software that defaults to Windows-1251 or Latin-1. The bytes are correct, the interpretation is wrong.
Our converter reads the input as UTF-8 and writes UTF-8-aware XLSX. Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, emoji — all preserved. If your CSV is actually in a different encoding (Shift-JIS, Windows-1251, etc.), open it in a text editor first and re-save as UTF-8 before converting. Most text editors (VS Code, Notepad++, Sublime) do this in two clicks.
When to use CSV, when to use Excel
| Scenario | CSV | Excel (.xlsx) |
|---|---|---|
| Database import / export | Best — universal format | Overhead you don't need |
| Sharing with non-technical people | They'll ask 'why can't I edit this?' | Everyone has Excel or LibreOffice |
| Multiple sheets needed | Can't do it — one sheet per file | Built for this |
| Version control (git) | Diffable line-by-line | Binary blob — can't diff |
| Formulas and charts | Nope | Yes |
| Large data (millions of rows) | Lightweight, streams well | XLSX limit: 1,048,576 rows |
Quick tips
- Bank statements and accounting exports — these are almost always semicolon-delimited with European number formatting (comma as decimal separator). Convert, then set Excel's locale.
- Google Sheets exports — default to comma-delimited UTF-8 CSV. Works perfectly with this converter.
- Leading zeros problem — ZIP codes, phone numbers, product SKUs with leading zeros get dropped by naive converters. We write all cells as text initially so this doesn't happen.