TXT to Excel Converter
Turn a plain text table into an Excel workbook. Handles tab, pipe, semicolon and comma separated files as well as fixed-width reports - free, private, and processed in your browser.
Drop your files here or click to upload
Supports .txt, .text, .dat, .prn · up to 50MB · or paste a file from your clipboard
How to Convert TXT to Excel
- Add the text file - Drop a .txt, .text, .dat, or .prn file onto the page. It is read locally in your browser.
- The layout is detected - The converter checks whether the file is column-aligned or separated by tabs, pipes, semicolons, commas, or carets, and picks the layout that fits every line consistently.
- Rows become spreadsheet cells - Each line becomes a row and each detected field a cell, with values kept as written so nothing is silently reformatted.
- Download the XLSX workbook - Save the workbook and open it in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, or Numbers.
Two Kinds of Text File, One Converter
A .csv announces its own structure. A .txt does not, and that is why opening one in Excel drops you into a three-step import wizard. Text exports come in two very different shapes, and telling them apart is most of the work:
- Delimited - fields separated by a character. Tabs are most common, then pipes from database exports, semicolons from European systems, and carets from older mainframe feeds.
- Fixed-width - no separator at all. Fields are padded with spaces so the columns line up when read in a monospace font. Bank statements, mainframe reports, and the output of many command-line tools look like this.
Fixed-width files are the ones that go wrong. Splitting an aligned report on spaces turns BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE into three columns and throws the rest of the row out of alignment. This converter checks alignment first: a character position only counts as a column boundary when every single line is blank there, so spaces inside a value can never be mistaken for a separator.
Values Are Kept Exactly as Written
Numbers arrive in the workbook as text. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. A text file carries no type information, so anything that looks numeric would have to be guessed at - and the guess is destructive. A ZIP code of 01234 becomes 1234, a product code of 1-2 becomes a date, and a 20-digit account number loses its last digits to floating point. Converting the columns you know are numeric takes seconds; recovering a column Excel silently mangled on import does not.