Excel to CSV Converter

Free and online. Open any XLSX, pick the sheet you want, get clean UTF-8 CSV with formulas exported as their computed values. No upload, no signup.

Prefer the full editor with cleanup tools? Open the app

When you'd convert Excel to CSV

Feeding a data pipeline. Most ingestion tools, ETL platforms, and database loaders expect CSV. Sending XLSX into them works only if a wrapper does the conversion first.
Opening an Excel file without Office. If you don't have Microsoft 365 or LibreOffice handy, browser-based conversion is the fastest route to seeing the data.
Batch-extracting many sheets. Some workbooks have one sheet per region or month. Exporting all of them at once into separate CSVs is much faster than clicking through Excel's Save As one sheet at a time.
Stripping formatting. XLSX carries cell colours, conditional formatting, comments, charts. Sometimes you just want the values. CSV is the cleanest way to throw away everything except the data.
Version control. XLSX is binary; CSV is text. If you're checking analyses into git, CSV diffs are readable and XLSX diffs are not.

Worked example: multi-sheet workbook

Say you have a workbook orders_2026.xlsx with three sheets:

orders_2026.xlsx
  Sheet "January"   - 1,200 rows
  Sheet "February"  - 1,180 rows
  Sheet "March"     - 1,302 rows

Drop the file into the converter above. The first sheet converts straight away and a sheet picker appears under the preview:

Sheet:  January   (1,200 rows x 8 columns)
        February
        March

Switch the picker and the conversion re-runs against that sheet, so you download January, then February, then March. If you want all 3,682 rows in one file instead, convert each sheet and append the three CSVs into a single table in the full editor.

Format-specific gotchas

Formulas: value vs text. Cells with =SUM(A1:A10) get exported as the cached result by default. If the workbook was saved with stale results (rare), open it in Excel once and resave. You can switch the export to write the formula text instead if you need that.
Merged cells. Excel allows merging cells across rows or columns. CSV cannot represent that. ExploreMyData places the merged value in the top-left cell of the merged region and leaves the others blank, which is the most common convention. Worth checking if your workbook uses merging heavily.
Hidden rows and columns. Hidden cells are still part of the XLSX, and they are included in the CSV. Delete or unhide them in Excel first if you want only what's visible.
Date locale and serial numbers. Excel stores dates internally as serial numbers (days since 1900). The locale determines display, and we write what the workbook displays. Format the cells as ISO 8601 in Excel first if you need dates that no downstream tool can misread.
Encoding. CSV is just text, but downstream tools differ on what they accept. We write plain UTF-8 with no byte order mark, which suits most Linux and Python tooling.
Workbooks larger than a sheet. XLSX has no real row cap, but a single sheet can theoretically hold up to 1,048,576 rows. For "raw data lake" extracts this is enough; for true big data, stop at the source.

How this differs from the alternatives

vs Convertio, Zamzar, CloudConvert, FreeConvert, ONLYOFFICE. All upload your XLSX (which often contains private business data) to a server. Free tiers cap at 1 to 100 MB depending on the service, and several throttle by daily minutes or free conversions. ExploreMyData reads the file locally with no upload and no metering.
vs TableConvert. Browser-based, comparable privacy, but caps free conversions at 10 MB per file. We don't.
vs pandas (read_excel + to_csv). Standard Python idiom, but requires openpyxl or xlrd installed and you have to script per-sheet handling yourself. ExploreMyData ships a UI for the common cases.
vs csvkit's in2csv. A great CLI: in2csv data.xlsx --sheet "March" > march.csv. Requires Python plus csvkit, and the multi-sheet UX is cumbersome (one shell loop per sheet). ExploreMyData has the same per-sheet picker in a browser tab.
vs Excel Save As CSV. Works, but exports only the active sheet per click and requires a paid Microsoft 365 license. ExploreMyData batches all sheets in one go and is free.
vs Google Sheets. Free, but uploads the XLSX to Google Drive (which means a Google account and Google's data residency), and exports only one sheet per File > Download. ExploreMyData stays local.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I convert a workbook with multiple sheets at once?

Yes. When you drop an XLSX with multiple sheets, ExploreMyData lists them and lets you export one sheet, several sheets, or all of them. Each sheet writes to its own CSV. You can also merge sheets with the same schema into a single CSV.

Are formulas evaluated to their current values?

Yes. By default we read the cached value Excel saved with the workbook. Formulas don't appear in the CSV; the result they computed does. There is no setting to write the formula text instead.

Does it handle password-protected XLSX files?

If the file is encrypted with a password, you'll be prompted for it when you open the file. The password stays in your browser; nothing is uploaded. We support standard XLSX encryption.

What encoding does the CSV use?

UTF-8 with no byte order mark, which is what most Linux and Python tooling expects. Excel on Windows sometimes needs the BOM to detect UTF-8, so if accented characters look wrong, bring the file in through Excel's text import wizard instead of double-clicking it.

How are dates exported?

Excel stores dates as serial numbers internally. The CSV carries the date the way the workbook displays it, so a cell shown as 1/15/26 arrives as 1/15/26 rather than a serial number. If you need ISO 8601, set the cell format in Excel before converting.

Is there a file size limit?

Up to 100 MB on this page. Workbooks are read with SheetJS, which unpacks the whole file inside the tab, so your browser's available memory is the real ceiling. Anything larger gets handed to the full editor.

Convert your Excel file to CSV

Drop an XLSX, pick a sheet, get clean CSV. No upload, no install, no signup.

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