About the TSV to CSV Converter
Copying a range of cells from Excel or Google Sheets puts tab-separated text on the clipboard. To turn that into a CSV file that other tools accept, the tabs must become commas and any cell that contains a comma, a quote or a line break must be quoted with inner quotes doubled. This converter does exactly that, following RFC 4180, so the result opens correctly everywhere.
The input is parsed as TSV explicitly, so commas inside cells are treated as data rather than separators. Empty cells are preserved so column positions do not shift.
Worth seeing the quoting rule in action: a cell reading He said "no" comes out as "He said ""no""", wrapped because it holds quotes and with each inner quote doubled. Any parser that follows RFC 4180 reads that back byte for byte, while a script that splits on commas without honouring quotes will mangle it, which is the single most common reason a CSV import goes sideways.
The gotcha here is usually upstream of this tool rather than in it. Excel and Sheets rewrite values as you type them, dropping the leading zero from a postcode and rounding a 16-digit card or account number into scientific notation, and by the time you copy the cells the original digits are already gone. Format those columns as text in the spreadsheet before copying. Once converted, download the .csv, or send the same data to code with TSV to JSON, or inspect it first in the CSV Viewer.
How to use
- Copy cells from your spreadsheet and paste them on the left, or upload a .tsv file.
- Copy or download the CSV.
- Open it in the tool that needed CSV.
Common questions
- Will commas inside cells break the CSV?
- No. Cells containing commas are quoted in the output.
- Does it keep the header row?
- Yes, the first row passes through unchanged as the header.
- Can I choose a semicolon instead of a comma?
- Not in this tool. Use CSV to TSV in reverse or the CSV converters, which offer a semicolon option.