Free Excel / XLSX Viewer

Worked example

Press "Try a sample spreadsheet" to open a workbook with two tabs, "Sales 2026" and "Team". The stats line shows 7 rows, 7 columns and 2 sheets (the header row counts), and the footer under the grid says "6 rows". Type widgets in "Search this sheet…" and the footer says "3 of 6 rows match". Click "Filter", choose the column Total, set the condition to "is between" and type 500 in "Min", and it says "2 of 6 rows match". Click the Total heading twice to sort from high to low: East Widgets (690) comes first, then North Widgets (640). "Download filtered rows (2)" under "More downloads" saves sample-spreadsheet_Sales 2026_filtered.csv with the header and those two rows, while "Download CSV" saves the whole sheet as sample-spreadsheet_Sales 2026.csv.

Which settings to use, and the limits

• Know how your file is opened. The file picker takes .xlsx, .xlsm, .xls, .ods, .csv and .tsv. Workbooks are loaded whole, and each sheet shows its first 100,000 rows and 60 columns, with the note "preview limited to first 100,000 rows (export for the full sheet)". CSV and TSV files are not loaded whole: the tool finds where each row starts, reads rows from disk as you scroll, and stops at 25,000,000 rows with the note "only the first 25,000,000 rows are shown". A very large workbook is therefore much heavier on memory than a CSV of the same data, so save it as CSV first if you can.
• Dates and formulas appear as Excel shows them. Cells show their formatted text, so dates appear as dates, percentages as percentages and currency with its symbol, not as raw serial numbers. Tick "Show formulas" to see the formula text instead of the result; the option appears only when the sheet contains formulas. The tool does not recalculate anything: it shows the result saved in the file, and for a formula with no saved result it shows the formula text. Sheets the author hid stay reachable, in italics with a dashed outline and marked "(hidden)".
• Fix garbled text with the encoding menu. For a CSV, "Text encoding" starts as "Auto-detected: ..." followed by the code page found from a byte-order mark, valid UTF-8 or the bytes and your browser language. If letters look wrong, choose the encoding the file was saved in from the list of 15, such as Windows-1252, Windows-1251, Shift-JIS, GBK or Big5, and the file is read again. The separator (comma, semicolon, tab or pipe) is detected from the first line, and a .tsv file is always read as tab-separated. Text such as 00123 keeps its leading zeros.
• Search, filter and sort. "Search this sheet…" matches text in any cell and ignores case. "Filter" adds a condition on one column: "contains" (ignoring case) or "is between" a "Min" and a "Max", inclusive, where either can be left empty. Numeric conditions also understand values like $1,200, 15% and (500), the last read as minus 500. All conditions must be true at once. Click a column heading to sort ascending, click again for descending and a third time to restore the original order. Numbers and dates sort as values, and empty cells always go last. Changes apply about a quarter of a second after you stop typing.
• Choose the export that fits. "Download CSV" saves the whole current sheet as CSV with a byte-order mark, so Excel shows accented and non-Latin text correctly. "More downloads" holds "Copy CSV" (for a streamed file up to 100,000 rows), JSON, "Excel (.xlsx)" and "OpenDocument (.ods)" (for a streamed CSV up to 200,000 rows), "Print / Save as PDF" (the first 2,000 rows shown) and, for a workbook with several sheets, "Download all sheets (.zip)". When a search or filter is active, "Download filtered rows (n)" appears, and "Export only the rows shown (filter and sort applied)" applies the view to JSON, .xlsx and .ods. JSON can be an array of objects, an array of arrays or one object per line, and workbook dates can be ISO text, as shown, or Excel serial numbers.
• Split a sheet or merge sheets. For workbooks, "Split into files / merge sheets" can split the current sheet into CSV files in one ZIP, either "Every N rows" (1000 by default) or "By a column's value", repeating the header row in each file. At most 500 files are made. With several sheets, "Download merged CSV" stacks all sheets under the first sheet's header and can add a Sheet column naming each row's sheet. Splitting works on the rows loaded into the grid, so it covers the first 100,000 rows and 60 columns of a sheet.

Common problems and how to fix them

It says "This workbook is encrypted with a password to open it. Open it in Excel with the password and save a copy without one first."

The file needs a password just to open, and the tool cannot read it without it. Open it in Excel or another spreadsheet program with the password, then save a copy without a password and open that copy here. This is different from sheet protection, which only blocks editing: for your own .xlsx or .xlsm file that is locked that way, open "Remove sheet protection (your own file)", tick that you own the file or may edit it, and press "Save unprotected copy". It does not recover passwords and cannot open files that need a password to open.

It says "Could not read this file. Make sure it's a valid spreadsheet (XLSX, XLS, CSV, or ODS)."

The file is damaged, cut short or not really a spreadsheet, for example a file renamed to .xlsx. Open the original in its own program and save a new copy as .xlsx or .csv. If the file lives in a cloud drive, make sure it is fully downloaded to this device first. A text file saved with a spreadsheet extension, such as a CSV named .xls, is read as text.

The letters in my CSV look wrong, or it says "This text file's encoding could not be read. Save it as UTF-8 CSV and try again."

Open the "Text encoding" menu above the grid and choose the encoding the file was saved in; the file is read again straight away. Western European text is often Windows-1252, Russian text Windows-1251, Japanese Shift-JIS and Chinese GBK or Big5. The error message appears for a UTF-16 file larger than 400 MB, which is too big to convert in the browser: save it as UTF-8 CSV and try again.

A note says "3 formulas have no saved result, so the formula text is shown. The file was probably written by a script; open and save it in Excel to calculate the values." (with your own count).

The file was written by a script or library that stored formulas without their calculated results, so there is nothing to display but the formula. This viewer does not calculate. Open the file in Excel or another spreadsheet program, let it calculate, save it, and open the saved copy here.

Rows seem to be missing: the footer says "preview limited to first 100,000 rows (export for the full sheet)" or "only the first 25,000,000 rows are shown".

In a workbook only the first 100,000 rows of each sheet are loaded into the grid. The stats line still shows the real row count, and "Download CSV" and the JSON, Excel and ODS downloads (without a filter) read the full sheet. Search, filters, sorting, the filtered download and splitting only use the loaded rows. For a CSV, rows past 25,000,000 are not read at all, so cut the file into smaller pieces first.

How it compares

A desktop spreadsheet program calculates formulas, edits cells, draws charts and pivot tables, and keeps colors and formatting. This viewer is read-only: it shows the text and values saved in the file, cannot edit them, and does not show charts, images or cell colors. In return it opens a CSV of millions of rows by reading it from disk instead of loading it whole, lets you search, filter and sort immediately, and exports the result as CSV, JSON, .xlsx, .ods or a printed page, without installing anything. For a quick look at a file, or to pull a slice out of a huge CSV, it is enough. To change data, recalculate or check how a sheet looks, use a spreadsheet program.