ViewCSV
Open a CSV or TSV file and it appears as a table you can scroll, search, sort and filter. Values are shown exactly as stored — leading zeros, long IDs and line breaks inside cells included. Files beyond 25 MB or 100,000 rows open in large-file mode: the file stays on disk and only the rows on screen are read, while search, sort and filter still cover every row. Nothing is uploaded.
How to open and view a CSV file
- Choose Open files or paste rows. The delimiter (comma, semicolon, tab or pipe) and UTF-8 or UTF-16 byte-order marks are detected automatically.
- Scroll the table, or type in Find in file and press Enter to show only matching rows. Go to row jumps to any row number.
- Click a column name to sort it or filter it. The View panel combines up to 8 sort columns and any number of conditions.
- Select a cell to read its full value and column statistics in the Cell panel; File shows the delimiter, encoding, line endings and size.
To change data, choose Open in editor: the same file opens in the CSV editor without being read again.
Opening large CSV files
A file over the in-memory limit (25 MB, 100,000 rows or 2 million cells) is indexed instead of loaded: the viewer records where each record starts and ends, then reads the rows you scroll to. In our test, a 200,000-row, 18.4 MB file was indexed in under a second in Chrome on a laptop; the time grows with file size and depends on your device.
Sorting and filtering read the whole file in the background and keep only the matching row positions (and the sort values) in memory, so the original file is never copied into the page.
Values are shown exactly as stored
- No value is converted:
007stays007,1.2300stays1.2300, and a 20-digit account number keeps every digit. - Quoted commas and quoted line breaks follow RFC 4180. A line break inside a cell is shown as ↵ in the grid and in full in the Cell panel.
- Blank column names become
Column 3, repeated onesname (2); the original names are listed in a notice. Rows shorter than the header are padded with empty cells and reported. - Characters in any script display as stored. Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left text is isolated so it doesn’t reorder the columns around it.
If the CSV opens in one column or shows odd characters
- Everything is in one column. The file uses a delimiter that wasn’t detected. Open it from a tool page (for example Change CSV delimiter and encoding) and choose the delimiter under Import settings, or convert it there.
- Letters like é or ä. The file isn’t UTF-8 — often Windows-1252 from older Excel versions, or Shift_JIS for Japanese files. Choose the encoding under Import settings on any tool page.
- A quoting error names a record. A quote opened in that record never closes, so the rest of the file would be read as one value. Fix it in a text editor or ask the source system for a new export.
What to do next with the same file
The file you open here stays available on every other ViewCSV page during your visit, so you don’t have to open it again:
- To change values, add rows or rename columns, use the CSV editor.
- To keep only matching rows, use Filter CSV rows; it also streams files larger than 25 MB.
- To total or group values, use the CSV pivot table and analysis tool, or draw the columns with the CSV chart maker.
- To find ragged rows and quoting problems before an import, run Validate CSV; to trim spaces and remove duplicates, use Clean CSV data.
- To hand the data to another program, convert it, for example CSV to Excel, which keeps leading zeros, or CSV to JSON. All converters are listed under Convert CSV.
Is my file uploaded?
The file is read by your browser and processed in this tab. ViewCSV has no upload endpoint for CSV data; closing the tab discards everything.
Questions and answers
Can I view an Excel file here?
Not yet — this viewer opens CSV, TSV and other delimited text files. In Excel, choose File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 first.
Can I export only the rows I filtered?
Yes, for files within the in-memory limit: Download shown rows saves the current view in the file’s format. For larger files, use Filter CSV, which streams the whole file.
Which files can the viewer open?
CSV and TSV files and other delimited text: the comma, semicolon, tab or pipe delimiter is detected automatically, and UTF-8 and UTF-16 files with a byte-order mark are recognized. For other encodings, such as Windows-1252 or Shift_JIS, choose the encoding under Import settings on a tool page. You can open several files at once.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no upload, so no upload limit applies. Files up to 25 MB, 100,000 rows or 2 million cells are loaded into memory. Larger files open in large-file mode, which reads only the rows on screen, while search, sort and filter still cover every row.