TSV

TSV is a plain-text tabular format that uses tab characters rather than commas as delimiters. Because tab characters rarely appear in field values, TSV avoids the quoting complexities that arise in CSV when data contains commas. It is common in bioinformatics, database exports, and data pipelines where programs exchange rows of data on the command line.

File extensions	.tsv, .tab
MIME type	text/tab-separated-values
Developer	Various (no single author)
First released	1972
Category	Spreadsheets
Open standard	Yes

What opens TSV files

• Microsoft Excel
• LibreOffice Calc
• Google Sheets
• Any text editor

Browse File Formats

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

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