Home · Free tools · CSV viewer
CSV viewer, online
Drop a .csv or .xlsx file and read it properly: search across every column, sort by clicking a header, page through it, and export what you are looking at. The file is read on your computer and is never uploaded.
Open a file
Drop .csv, .tsv or .xlsx here, or click to choose
Doing this every month? Do it once in TableDI 2, save it as a job, and run it again next month. Download TableDI 2 free
Nothing is uploaded. The file is read by JavaScript in this tab and never leaves your computer — no server sees it, and closing the tab throws it away.
What this CSV viewer does that a text editor doesn't
- Quoted fields are parsed properly. A comma inside
"Smith, John"stays inside the cell, and a doubled quote comes back as one character. - The delimiter is detected. Files exported in Germany, France or Spain are usually semicolon-separated; tab-separated exports are common out of databases. All three are read without you configuring anything.
- Sorting knows what a number is. Click a header to sort;
$1,200and900sort as amounts, not as text, so 1,200 comes after 900 rather than before it. - Search runs across every column at once, and the row count above the table tells you how many rows matched.
Opening a large CSV file without Excel choking
Excel stops at 1,048,576 rows per sheet, and it slows down long before that. This page never paints more than one hundred rows at a time, so the browser stays responsive on files that make a spreadsheet application think about it. The practical ceiling is your machine's memory, not a row cap.
A caveat worth stating plainly: the whole file is loaded into memory to be searched and sorted. A 400 MB CSV on a laptop with little free RAM will be slow or will fail. If that is your daily reality, a browser tab is the wrong tool — see the last section.
Exporting what you're looking at
The buttons under the table export the current view — filtered and sorted as you left it — as CSV, as .xlsx, or copied to the clipboard as a Markdown table for pasting into a pull request or a wiki. Nothing is uploaded to produce them; the files are assembled in the tab.
Why an online CSV viewer is a privacy decision
Most files people need to eyeball in a hurry are exports: a customer list, a payroll journal, an export from a CRM with names and phone numbers in it. Uploading that to a free web service to look at four columns is a disclosure, and it is usually not one anybody agreed to.
This page reads the file with JavaScript in your tab. There is no upload step to skip, because there is no upload.
When you need more than a viewer
Viewing is where CSV work starts, not where it ends. The moment the same export has to be checked against another file, or put through the same cleanup every month, a read-only viewer runs out.
TableDI 2 is a desktop app for file work you redo every period: it keeps your sources, rules and delivery as a job, so next month you drop in the new files and run it again. Everything runs on your own machine. Files past Excel's 1,048,576-row limit still filter and export there, and next month's export goes through the same checks as this one.
Questions people ask
How do I open a large CSV file that Excel will not open?
Drop it on this page. The viewer pages through the file rather than rendering all of it, so a file past Excel's 1,048,576-row limit still opens and stays searchable. For repeated work on files that size, use a desktop tool: what to do when you hit Excel's row limit.
How do I open a large CSV file that Excel cannot?
Drop it here. The file is read in chunks in your browser, so a CSV with more rows than Excel's 1,048,576-row sheet still opens, searches and sorts; the row count is shown at the top so you know what you are dealing with. To hand part of it to Excel, filter and export the slice you need, or use the CSV splitter to cut it into sheet-sized files.
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by JavaScript running in this tab, using the browser's own
DecompressionStream to unzip .xlsx and a parser that runs on your machine. The page does load two visitor counters — static.cloudflareinsights.com and this site's own /_vercel/insights — but no request carrying your data appears in the network tab while you use it. Close the tab and the data is gone.
Can I edit the CSV here?
You can filter, sort and export — a working view of the data — but this page does not write cells back. Editing a CSV in a browser tab that could be closed by accident is a poor place to keep the only copy of your data. Export to .xlsx and edit it in your spreadsheet program instead.
Which delimiters and encodings are supported?
Comma, semicolon, tab and pipe are detected automatically from the first few lines. The text encoding is detected too — UTF-8, Shift-JIS, Big5, GBK, EUC-KR, UTF-16 and Windows-1252 — using the byte-order mark when there is one and strict decoding when there is not, so a Japanese or Taiwanese export does not arrive as mojibake. The detected encoding is printed above the table, and everything you export is written as UTF-8.
Does it work with old .xls files?
Not directly. The .xls format is a different, binary format from Excel 97. Open it in Excel, LibreOffice or Numbers and save as .xlsx or .csv, then come back. The tool tells you this rather than failing silently.
Does it work offline?
Once the page has loaded, yes — the parsing runs locally. Reload it while offline and the browser will need its cached copy; the parsing itself never needs the network either way.
Related
Doing this every month?
In TableDI 2 you do it once, then save it as a job. Next month you drop in the new files and run it again.
macOS, Apple silicon and Intel; Windows is in progress (what to do meanwhile). Free is not a trial — no account, no card.
Last reviewed 2026-09-11 by the TableDI team. Something wrong on this page? Tell us — it is one inbox, read by the people who build TableDI.