Excel to Text Converter
Convert an Excel sheet to clean tab-separated plain text in your browser.
How to use the Excel to Text Converter
Step 1 — Upload
- Select an .xlsx, .xls, or .csv file. It is read in your browser.
Step 2 — Pick the sheet
- If the workbook has multiple sheets, choose which one to convert.
Step 3 — Set options
- No options needed — the output is clean tab-separated text.
Step 4 — Copy or download
- Copy the text, or download it as a file.
Frequently asked questions
Tab-separated values: columns are separated by tabs and rows by line breaks. This pastes neatly into text editors, emails, and even back into a spreadsheet, which recognises tabs as column breaks.
Tabs keep columns aligned and unambiguous. Unlike fixed spaces, a single tab between fields lets the receiving program rebuild the columns exactly, with no guessing about where one ends.
Yes. The output is plain UTF-8 text with no byte-order mark or binary characters, so it displays correctly everywhere.
Yes, select any sheet from a multi-sheet workbook before converting.
No. Your spreadsheet is read and converted entirely in your browser using JavaScript, so the file never leaves your device and there is no upload size limit beyond your own memory.
About the Excel to Text Converter
This tool converts an Excel or CSV sheet into clean, tab-separated plain text. It is the quick way to pull tabular data out of a spreadsheet into a format you can paste into a plain-text editor, an email, a code comment, or a system that expects TSV, all processed in your browser.
Why tab-separated text
When you just need the values as text, tab separation is the most practical choice. Columns are divided by a single tab character and rows by line breaks, which keeps the data unambiguous: the receiving program can rebuild the exact column structure because a tab is a clear, single boundary, unlike runs of spaces that can be miscounted. Tab-separated text also round-trips well — paste it back into Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers and the application splits it into columns automatically.
Clean and universal
The output is plain UTF-8 text with no byte-order mark and no binary characters, so it opens correctly in Notepad, VS Code, terminal tools, and anywhere else, including non-Latin scripts. Only the cell values are exported — formulas appear as their results, and styling is not included — which is exactly what plain text means.
Sheets and privacy
Pick any sheet from a multi-sheet workbook before converting. Your spreadsheet is read and converted entirely in your browser using JavaScript, so the file never leaves your device and there is no upload size limit beyond your own memory. If you need a delimiter other than tab, the Excel to CSV Converter lets you choose comma, semicolon, or pipe.