TSV to CSV
Convert tab-separated text to CSV in your browser. Paste straight from Excel, Sheets or Numbers — values with commas are quoted properly.
Related tools
All Data tools →This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to our servers, so there is nothing for us to store or see.
About the TSV to CSV
Convert tab-separated text into proper CSV. The most useful thing about this tool is what you can paste into it: when you copy a block of cells from Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or almost any database client, what lands on your clipboard is tab-separated text. So you can select a range in a spreadsheet, copy, paste it here, and get a valid CSV back without saving a file at all. Everything runs on your own device and nothing is uploaded.
Going from tabs to commas is exactly where naive conversion breaks, because commas are common inside real values and tabs are not. A cell reading Paris, France needs quoting the moment the separator becomes a comma, and a replace-the-tabs approach does not add those quotes — it produces a file with one extra column on that row and every value after it shifted. Here the text is parsed as TSV and written out as CSV, so quoting is recalculated from scratch: values containing a comma, a quotation mark or a line break all get the quotes they now need.
Tabs inside a quoted value survive, which matters for anything copied out of a cell that had indented text in it. The byte-order mark option is worth ticking if the result is going straight back into Excel, since that is what tells it the file is UTF-8 and stops accented names arriving as mojibake.
How to use the TSV to CSV
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Copy your cells
Select a range in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or your database client and copy it. What goes on the clipboard is tab-separated text.
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Paste it in
Paste into the left pane, or drop a .tsv or .txt file onto it — dropping reads the file locally and never uploads it.
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Choose your options
Pick line endings, and add a byte-order mark if the CSV is going straight into Excel. Quote every field if a strict importer expects it.
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Copy or download
The CSV appears on the right as you type. Copy it, or download it as a .csv file.
Frequently asked questions
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion runs inside your browser and nothing is sent to a server. You can disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded and it will keep working exactly as before.
Can I paste straight from Excel or Google Sheets?
Yes, and it is the main reason to use this tool. Copying a range of cells puts tab-separated text on your clipboard, so you can paste it here directly and get CSV back without exporting or saving a file first.
Why not just replace the tabs with commas?
Because commas are common inside real values and tabs are not. A cell reading "Paris, France" needs quoting the instant the separator becomes a comma, and replacing tabs does not add those quotes — the result has an extra column on that row and every value after it shifted one place. Parsing and re-writing is the only way that cannot happen.
What if my text has no tabs in it?
You are told so rather than handed back a single-column file that looks converted. Text with no tabs is not TSV, and it usually means the separator is something else — the Change CSV Delimiter tool handles commas, semicolons and pipes.
Should I add the byte-order mark?
Tick it if the CSV is going straight into Excel on Windows, where it is what signals the file is UTF-8 and stops accented characters arriving as mojibake. Leave it off if the file is going into a script or a command-line tool, several of which treat it as part of the first value.