TSV to Excel Converter
Paste tab-separated text or upload a TSV file, preview the rows, and download a clean .xlsx workbook. Nothing uploads to a server.
How to Convert TSV to Excel
- Paste or upload - paste tab-separated text into the box, or upload a .tsv, .tab or .txt file. A single upload fills the box so you can edit it first; several at once convert as a batch.
- Set Trim whitespace - on by default, and remembered between visits.
- Check the preview - the first 20 parsed rows appear below, with the row and column counts, so a mis-split file is obvious before you download.
- Download the .xlsx - rename the output in the sidebar if you want something other than the source file name.
What the parser does with your file
The text is split on tab characters, with CSV-style quoting rules applied on top:
- Quoted fields - a double quote opens a quoted section and the next one closes it. Inside, tabs and line breaks are part of the value rather than separators, and a doubled
""is one literal quote. - Line endings - LF, CRLF and lone CR all end a row, so a file written on Windows, Unix or an old Mac reads the same way.
- Blank lines are dropped rather than becoming empty rows, so a file with a trailing newline does not gain a phantom last row.
- Ragged rows are padded to the width of the widest row, so the sheet comes out rectangular and Excel's sort and filter behave.
- Empty fields become blank cells - two tabs in a row leave an empty cell, not a zero-length string.
- Encoding is detected from the bytes, not assumed: byte order mark, then the NUL pattern of BOM-less UTF-16, then UTF-8 structural validity, then Windows-1252 as the fallback that can never fail. Any byte order mark is stripped rather than welded to the first header cell.
Every cell arrives as text
Tab-separated text has no types. The parser does not guess, so each field is written to the workbook as a string: 42000 becomes the text 42000, and Excel marks the cell with the green "Number stored as text" triangle.
That is the trade that keeps 00123, a leading-zero postcode and a phone number beginning 0044 intact - all three are destroyed the moment something decides they look numeric. When you want real numbers, select the column in Excel and use Convert to Number, or run the downloaded workbook through Convert Text to Number. The same applies to dates: 2024-01-05 arrives as text, and Excel Date Converter turns a column of them into real dates.
Edge cases
- Bare double quotes derail the split. An inch mark or an unmatched quote opens a quoted section that runs to the next quote in the file. If the preview shows one enormous cell, this is why.
- Only .tsv, .tab and .txt uploads are accepted. Anything else is refused with a message rather than parsed as whatever it happens to be. Rename the file, or paste its contents instead.
- An empty file is reported, not silently ignored. Selecting a file with no content shows a message instead of leaving the page unchanged.
- Excel's own ceilings apply. Rows past 1,048,576 and columns past 16,384 are dropped, and any single cell longer than 32,767 characters is truncated, because the format cannot hold more.
- Everything lands on one sheet, named
TSVwhen you paste or upload a single file andCSVin batch mode. There is no splitting on a key column here - use Split Excel by Column afterwards. - A file that is actually comma-separated will come out as one column, because the delimiter is fixed to tab on this page. Use CSV to Excel instead, which detects the separator.
When to use a different tool
- Commas or semicolons instead of tabs, or a file whose separator you are not sure of: CSV to Excel.
- A .txt export that might be pipe-separated or aligned into fixed-width columns: TXT to Excel.
- Going the other way, worksheet to tab-separated text: Excel to TSV.
- Editing the data rather than converting it: CSV Editor or Excel Editor.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because every field is written to the workbook as text. A tab-separated file carries no type information, so 42000 and 00123 look identical to the parser, and guessing would destroy the second one. The upside is that leading zeros in ZIP codes, account numbers and SKUs arrive intact; the cost is that SUM over the column returns 0 until you select it and use Excel's Convert to Number, or run the file through the Convert Text to Number tool.
The parser follows CSV quoting rules, where a double quote opens a quoted section and the next one closes it. TSV files in the wild often have no quoting convention at all, so a measurement written 5" pipe opens a quoted section that runs on until the next double quote somewhere later in the file, swallowing the tabs and line breaks in between. If your data contains bare double quotes and no quoting, replace them before pasting - with a Unicode prime, or by doubling each one.
With it on (the default) every field has its leading and trailing spaces removed after the tabs are split. Turn it off when the padding is meaningful - an aligned report, a fixed-width field that was tab-separated as an afterthought, or a column where a trailing space distinguishes two codes.
Yes. That export is UTF-16LE, not UTF-8, as are PowerShell's Export-Csv and bcp -w. The encoding is worked out from the file's bytes - byte order mark first, then the NUL pattern of BOM-less UTF-16, then UTF-8 validity, then Windows-1252 - so those files arrive as text rather than as every-other-character NULs.
Yes. Select more than one file in the upload dialog and they convert as a batch, downloadable as a single ZIP with one .xlsx per input. Batch mode skips the preview and the editable textarea; the Trim whitespace setting still applies.