TXT to Excel Converter

Machines, old programs and colleagues still hand out data as .txt files. Upload one and get an .xlsx workbook with each line as a row, ready to sort and total in Excel.

or drop PDF, DOC, DOCX … files here ·

Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes

Output

Convert to

Formatting

Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.

How to use this tool

1
Upload the text file
Add the .txt export, a list saved from Notepad or a batch of up to 20 files, each up to 95 MB.
2
Leave XLSX as the target
Convert to is set to XLSX (Excel) and Formatting to Simple, which writes a clean grid without fonts or colors to clean up later.
3
Convert and check the columns
Press Convert to XLSX, open the workbook and make sure each field landed in its own column before you start formulas.

Where text files that belong in Excel come from

Plain text is the oldest way for one program to hand data to another, and plenty of software still does it: point-of-sale systems write daily sales as tab-separated text, lab and factory instruments log readings line by line, banks offer statement downloads as .txt, and accounting packages from the 1990s print reports to text files. Colleagues add their own, such as a list of order numbers pasted into Notepad.

Excel can open those files, but only through the import wizard, which asks for the file type, delimiter and column formats every single time. Converting to XLSX does that once and leaves you with a normal workbook you can email, store in SharePoint or open on a phone.

How many lines a TXT to Excel conversion can hold

Recommended

10,00065,5361,048,576Beyond

10,000
A typical daily export; opens instantly
65,536
The old XLS ceiling from Excel 2003
1,048,576
The XLSX ceiling per sheet since Excel 2007
Beyond
Too many lines for one sheet; keep the data as CSV

Open the TXT in Excel or convert it first

Built in

Open in Excel

File, Open, then the Text Import Wizard or Data, From Text/CSV.

You choose delimiters and column types
Repeated for every file
Needs Excel on that computer

This page

Convert to XLSX

Upload, press Convert to XLSX, download the workbook.

Separators detected for you
Up to 20 files at once
Works from any browser

TXT and XLSX format facts

TXT

Plain text

A TXT file contains only plain characters with no formatting, fonts, images or layout. Modern text files are usually encoded in UTF-8, which covers every language, though older files may use other encodings and show garbled characters. Plain text is tiny, never becomes obsolete and opens on every device, from phones to servers. It cannot hold bold text, tables or pictures, so structure must be expressed with spacing or simple markup.

Compression: –
Transparency: –
Animation: –
Introduced: –

TXT converter

XLSX

Microsoft Excel workbook

XLSX is Microsoft Excel's default workbook format since Office 2007, based on the Office Open XML standard. It stores multiple sheets, formulas, formatting, charts, pivot tables and data validation in a ZIP package of XML. It supports over a million rows per sheet and is the default exchange format for business spreadsheets. Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers open XLSX, though macros and advanced features may not carry over.

Compression: –
Transparency: –
Animation: –
Introduced: 2007 · Microsoft

XLSX converter

Text files become Excel workbooks when a raw export from a till, a lab instrument or an old accounting program has to be read by a person who wants columns, filters and totals rather than lines of characters.

One detail worth knowing about Excel itself: it stores numbers with 15 significant digits, so a 16-digit card number or a long tracking code typed into a number cell loses its last digits. If your text file holds identifiers like that, check those columns in the workbook before deleting the original. For text that is really a document rather than a table, TXT to Word is the better target.

TXT to Excel questions

How do I convert a TXT file to Excel without the Text Import Wizard?

Upload it here instead of opening it in Excel. The converter reads the lines, splits them at the tabs, commas or semicolons it finds and writes a finished workbook, so you skip the three wizard screens and get the same result on every file of a batch.

My text file is just a list, one item per line. What does Excel get?

A single column with one row per line, which is often exactly what you need for a mailing list, a set of serial numbers or keywords to deduplicate. Empty lines become empty rows, so delete them afterwards with a filter if they get in the way.

Which text encodings can the file use?

UTF-8, the default in Notepad since Windows 10 version 1903 and on macOS and Linux, is read as is. If accented names look wrong in the workbook, the file was saved in an older code page; open it in Notepad, save it again as UTF-8 and convert once more.

Does the converter accept .log, .dat or .prn files?

Only files ending in .txt, .csv and the other document types listed in the upload area. Many .log and .dat exports are ordinary text, so renaming the copy to .txt is enough to convert it.

Should I choose TXT to Excel or TXT to CSV?

Pick Excel when a person will read, filter or chart the data. Pick TXT to CSV when the next step is an import into a database, a shop or a CRM; that page also lets you set the delimiter yourself, including pipe and space.