Convert Excel 97–2003 (XLS) to CSV
Free online converter for Excel 97–2003 (XLS) files. Delimiter-separated tabular data. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a Excel 97–2003 (XLS) file to convert it to CSV. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About XLS and CSV
Excel 97–2003 (XLS) .xls
Excel's pre-2007 binary workbook. Capped at 65,536 rows, which is the limit people usually hit before deciding to convert.
Good for
- Opens in very old versions of Excel
- Still emitted by some legacy systems
Trade-offs
- Hard limit of 65,536 rows and 256 columns
- Binary and proprietary
- Superseded for nearly twenty years
application/vnd.ms-excel
CSV .csv
Rows of plain text with values separated by commas. No formatting, no formulas, no sheets — just the data, which is what makes it universal.
Good for
- Readable by every spreadsheet, database and programming language
- Tiny, and trivial to generate or parse
- Nothing hidden — the file is exactly what it appears to be
Trade-offs
- One table only: no sheets, formulas, colours or charts
- No standard for encoding, so accents and symbols often corrupt
- Commas and line breaks inside values need careful quoting
text/csv
XLS and CSV side by side
| XLS | CSV | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Binary | None — plain text |
| Animation | No | No |
| Typically used for | Legacy spreadsheets and older exports | Data exchange, imports and exports, reporting |
What changes when you convert XLS to CSV
Rendered by LibreOffice
The conversion runs through headless LibreOffice — the same engine behind the desktop suite, not a lookalike parser. It handles ordinary documents faithfully. Where it can drift is on the elaborate: a document leaning on fonts the server does not have will have them substituted, and the substitute rarely occupies exactly the same width, so line and page breaks can move. Heavily designed layouts are worth checking against the original.
XLS is the pre-2007 binary format
Microsoft replaced XLS with its XML-based successor in Office 2007, and support has been quietly eroding since — recent versions of Office block these files by default on security grounds, because the old binary format can carry macros in ways that are hard to inspect. Converting is usually the right move for anything you intend to keep. Macros are not carried across.
One sheet of your XLS, values only
A XLS can hold many sheets; a CSV is a single table of plain values. Formulas are replaced by the results they had calculated, and formatting, charts and any additional sheets have nowhere to go in the format. It travels everywhere in exchange for holding a good deal less.
Formulas arrive as their results
What is read is the value each cell had last time the workbook was calculated, not the formula that produced it. That is almost always what you want from an export. It does mean the output is a snapshot: nothing in it recalculates, and a workbook saved without being recalculated will export whatever stale values it was holding.