CSV

CSV is a plain-text tabular format in which each line represents a row and values within a row are separated by commas (or sometimes semicolons or tabs). It has no standard specification but has been in use since the 1970s on mainframes. CSV is the most portable data-exchange format for tabular data: every spreadsheet application, database, and data-processing language can read it, even though it supports no formulas, charts, or multiple sheets.

File extensions	.csv
MIME type	text/csv
Developer	Various (no single author)
First released	1972
Category	Spreadsheets
Open standard	Yes

What opens CSV files

• Microsoft Excel
• LibreOffice Calc
• Google Sheets
• Any text editor
• Python / R (programmatically)

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives