Stays local
TSV never leaves your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
No signup. Free. Paste or open a file.
Fix cells in a table, then download in the encoding you need.
TSV never leaves your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Click a cell and fix it — lighter than wrestling Excel.
Save as UTF-8, UTF-8 BOM, or Shift-JIS for Excel.
Paste text or choose a TSV file.
Press “Show table” and edit cells in place.
Pick an encoding and save. Done.
My TSV is a free browser tool for editing TSV tables that are awkward in Excel.
Paste text or open a file, then edit cells directly in table view.
When saving, choose UTF-8 / UTF-8 (BOM) / Shift-JIS to avoid mojibake in Excel.
No signup or login — completely free.
TSV content is not uploaded to a server; processing stays on your device.
Even files with personal data can be edited and downloaded without sending them elsewhere.
TSV stands for Tab-Separated Values. It is a plain-text format for tabular data. When people search “what is TSV” or “TSV vs CSV,” the short answer is: like CSV, but columns are separated by tab characters instead of commas. It is common in logs, database exports, analytics, and spreadsheet round-trips.
TSV is not a programming language. It is a convention for writing tables: one record per line, fields split by tabs. When cells contain commas—addresses, product names, notes—tabs often break less often than commas. Humans can open the file in an editor; programs can parse it with relatively simple rules.
Delimited text is as old as machine data exchange. Commas, tabs, and pipes have all been used as field separators. In UNIX toolchains and research workflows, tab-separated tables have been a long-standing default.
Excel and Google Sheets also read and write tab-delimited text. Copying cells often behaves like a TSV fragment, so the format stays natural as a bridge between spreadsheets and plain text.
The MIME type text/tab-separated-values is widely recognized. Unlike CSV’s well-known RFC 4180, TSV is guided more by practice than by one famous RFC—yet teams still need reliable TSV editing, encoding checks, and grid previews.
Key points:
\t), which is not the same as spacesEditors that convert tabs to spaces can silently break columns. Excel mojibake and dropped leading zeros happen just like with CSV. Browser TSV table editors and encoding-aware downloads help.
Analytics, logs, and data platforms favor TSV when message text contains commas. Many CLI tools and pandas-style workflows ingest it cleanly.
Database export/import often uses tab-delimited files for bulk load or copy-paste transfer. Research datasets are frequently published as TSV too.
Spreadsheet hand-offs remain everyday: paste into Sheets/Excel, tweak a few cells, export again. TSV is a human-editable middle format between systems.
CSV is the most recognized table text format, but commas inside prose split columns. TSV avoids that with tabs. Excel .xlsx keeps formatting and sheets but is heavier for code. JSON nests well but is awkward for bulk cell edits. Pick the format that matches the job.
Checking encoding, fixing a few cells, and keeping sensitive files local are common needs. My TSV lets you paste or open a file, edit in a grid, and download as UTF-8 / UTF-8 (BOM) / Shift-JIS—free, no signup, processed only on your device.