# CSV Viewer

A CSV viewer that opens a CSV or TSV as a table without Excel. Quoted fields, semicolons and the byte order mark all read correctly. Nothing is uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/csv-viewer

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: CSV, TSV and semicolon or pipe separated text in. Shown as a table, with the parsed data available as JSON or as a cleaned CSV to download.
- Limits: The file is held in memory and the first few thousand rows are drawn, with the rest counted rather than rendered, because a browser drawing a hundred thousand table rows stops responding.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, once the page has loaded. The tool keeps working with no network connection.

## Questions

### Why not just open the CSV in Excel?

Two reasons people arrive here. Excel mangles things on the way in: it turns 007123 into 7123, reads 3-4 as a date, and truncates at about a million rows. And it is not always installed, on a locked-down work laptop or a phone. This draws the file as it actually is, without interpreting any cell as a number or a date.

### Does it change my file?

Not on disk, ever. The file is read and drawn, and nothing is written back over it. The download button hands you a new file containing what was parsed, which is useful when the original had a byte order mark or inconsistent line endings you want cleaned up, and it leaves the original exactly where it was.

### How big a file can it open?

Tens of megabytes is comfortable on a desktop. The whole file is parsed but only the first few thousand rows are drawn as table cells, with the remainder counted in the header, because a browser asked to lay out a hundred thousand rows of a table will hang rather than scroll.

### Are leading zeros and long numbers preserved?

Yes, because nothing here treats a cell as a number. Every value is the text that was in the file, so a postcode, a phone number, an order reference and a sixteen digit card number all survive intact. This is the single most common reason a CSV looks wrong after a trip through a spreadsheet.

### Can it open a file with an unusual separator?

The separator is detected from the header line across comma, semicolon, tab and pipe, and if the guess is wrong you can set it by hand and the table redraws. Detection uses the header rather than the whole file, because a body row containing prose will happily out-vote the real separator.

## Related tools

- [CSV to JSON](https://filetity.com/csv-to-json): Turn a CSV or TSV file into JSON, as an array of objects or as rows.
- [JSON to CSV](https://filetity.com/json-to-csv): Turn a JSON array into a CSV file that opens correctly in a spreadsheet.