CSV viewer

Look inside a CSV file without opening a spreadsheet

CSV files are the common way to move tabular data between systems: exports from a bank, a shop, a CRM or a database, reports from analytics tools, lists of contacts. They are plain text, so you can open them in any editor, but a few thousand lines of commas are hard to read. Opening them in a spreadsheet works, but it can be slow, it may rewrite numbers and dates without asking, and it needs a program installed. This viewer shows the file as a clean table in the browser and changes nothing.

What you can do

• Read it as a table, with the header row fixed at the top while you scroll.
• Search across every column at once to find a name, an order number or an error.
• Sort by clicking a column header. Columns full of numbers are sorted as numbers, not as text, so 9 comes before 10.
• Page through large files. Only one hundred rows are drawn at a time, so a file with hundreds of thousands of rows does not freeze the page.

Separators and encodings

Not every CSV uses commas. Files exported from Spanish and many European programs use semicolons, because the comma is the decimal mark, and others use tabs or vertical bars. The viewer detects the separator from the first lines, and you can choose it by hand if the guess is wrong. It also handles quoted cells that contain separators or line breaks, and it reads both UTF-8 and the older Windows encoding that Excel uses, so accents do not turn into strange symbols.

Private by design

The file is read in your browser and never uploaded. That matters for customer lists, payroll exports and any data you would rather not send to a stranger's server.

Limits

Files up to 60 MB are accepted, but very large files depend on the memory of your device. The viewer is for reading; it does not edit cells or save changes. To tidy the data, use the CSV cleaner, and to keep only some columns, the column selector.