Updated · Built and checked by the PlinzoTools team, formulas tested against published sources
Convert tab-separated (TSV) data into comma-separated (CSV) format.
Your result will appear here.
This tool converts tab-separated values (TSV, the format Excel/Google Sheets produce when you copy a range and paste as plain text) into comma-separated values (CSV) -- replacing tab delimiters with commas, quoting any field that contains a comma, quote, or newline, and dropping blank lines.
Paste your TSV data (e.g. copied directly from a spreadsheet). The converted CSV appears instantly.
The converter reads your pasted text one line at a time, ignores lines that are completely blank, and splits each remaining line at every tab character. It then writes the fields back out joined by commas. Importantly, the writer is quote-aware: any field that contains a comma, a double quote, or a line break is wrapped in double quotes, and any double quote inside such a field is doubled. This means the output is generally valid CSV even when your data contains commas, which is more careful than a simple find-and-replace of tabs with commas would be.
Imagine you copy three spreadsheet rows, using made-up values. The first row is Product, Price, Note. The second is Desk lamp, 24.99, "Warm light, dimmable". The third is Mug, 8.50, Dishwasher safe. When pasted, the fields are separated by tabs. The output will be:
Notice that the note containing a comma was wrapped in quotes automatically, so a CSV reader will treat it as one field rather than two.
The splitting step is a plain split on the tab character; it does not interpret quotation marks on the input side. If your TSV file already wraps fields in double quotes, and especially if those quoted fields contain tabs or line breaks, the tool will not merge them back into single fields. The quotes are treated as ordinary characters, so a field that was already quoted may end up with doubled quotation marks after conversion. For typical spreadsheet copy-and-paste data this is rarely a problem, but for files exported from a database with quoted text, inspect the result before relying on it.
Other details worth knowing: leading and trailing spaces in a field are preserved, empty cells stay empty (you will see consecutive commas), and the conversion does not change number or date formats. A value like 007 stays as text, but be aware that when you later open the CSV in a spreadsheet application, the program may reformat it, removing leading zeros or converting text that looks like a date. If that matters, import the file using the application's text import wizard and mark those columns as text.
Many web forms, email marketing platforms, and import tools accept only CSV. TSV is popular because tabs rarely appear inside real data, but CSV is the more widely accepted interchange format. Converting lets you move data out of a spreadsheet or a terminal export and into those systems without installing software. It is also a quick way to prepare test data for a developer, since most programming libraries read CSV out of the box.
The tool wraps any field containing a comma, a double quote, or a newline in double quotes (doubling any inner quotes), so those values stay in one column in the CSV output.
Yes. Any field that contains a comma, a double quote, or a line break is wrapped in double quotes in the output, with inner quotes doubled, so the resulting CSV keeps those fields intact.
Completely empty lines are dropped from the output. Lines that contain only tabs are kept and become rows of empty fields.
Not perfectly. The input is split on tabs without interpreting quotes, so pre-quoted fields containing tabs or line breaks are not reassembled. Review the result if your source uses quoting.
No, this converter only splits on tabs. Use the Text to CSV Converter and choose semicolon as the field separator instead.