Convert Excel (XLSX) to CSV
Free online converter for Excel (XLSX) files. Delimiter-separated tabular data. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
Drag and drop your files
or
Upload a Excel (XLSX) 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 XLSX and CSV
Excel (XLSX) .xlsx
Excel's modern workbook format — zipped XML holding sheets, formulas, formatting and charts.
Good for
- Keeps live formulas, not just their results
- Multiple sheets, charts and conditional formatting
- The default in nearly every business
Trade-offs
- Formula compatibility varies between spreadsheet applications
- Heavier than CSV for plain tabular data
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
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
XLSX and CSV side by side
| XLSX | CSV | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Zipped XML | None — plain text |
| Animation | No | No |
| Typically used for | Spreadsheets, financial models, reports | Data exchange, imports and exports, reporting |
What changes when you convert XLSX to CSV
One sheet of your XLSX, values only
A XLSX 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.
Read directly, never opened
No spreadsheet application is involved in this conversion. The file is parsed in our own process and the data is written straight out, which is both faster than launching an office suite and safer: macros in a workbook are never in a position to run, because nothing here is capable of running them. It also means the output is exactly the data, with none of an office suite's opinions about formatting applied on the way through.
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.