Table Viewer

Read-only viewer for Excel (.xlsx, .xls), CSV, and TSV files in VS Code.

Why

If you work with scripts that output tables — R, Stata, Python, or anything else — you've probably dealt with the friction of viewing those results. You rerun your script, but your viewer doesn't refresh. Or it does, but you lose your scroll position, your column widths, and the worksheet tab you were looking at. You resize columns again, or you go back to encoding widths in your script — tedious and imprecise.

Existing solutions were slow, didn't work the way I wanted, or both. I wanted a viewer that:

• Auto-refreshes when the file changes on disk, without losing my place
• Remembers layout — column widths, row heights, scroll position, and active sheet — across reloads and sessions
• Lets me toggle formatting so I can see raw values (3.14159265358979) or formatted output (3.14) with one click
• Lives in VS Code so it works the same whether I'm local or on a remote host via SSH
• Uses VS Code's theme so it doesn't look out of place
• Shows CSV/TSV files two ways — as a standalone table, or as a synced side-by-side preview alongside the source text

Table Viewer is the result.

Features

Viewing

• Opens .xlsx, .xls, .csv, and .tsv files
• Multi-sheet workbooks with horizontal or vertical tab orientation
• Merged cells with correct colspan/rowspan rendering
• Bold and italic text styling from Excel formatting

Auto-refresh

• Watches the file on disk and reloads automatically when it changes
• Preserves column widths, row heights, scroll position, and active sheet across reloads

Layout

• Drag column and row borders to resize
• Double-click a column border to auto-fit to content
• Select multiple columns and resize or auto-fit them together
• All layout state is persisted per file across VS Code sessions

Formatting toggle

• Switch between formatted and raw cell values with one click
• Useful for inspecting the exact number behind a formatted display

CSV/TSV modes

• Open as Table: opens the file in its own viewer tab
• Open Preview to the Side: split view with the source editor on the left and the table on the right, with synchronized scrolling between them

Selection and copy

• Click, drag, or shift-click to select cells
• Arrow keys and h/j/k/l to navigate
• Ctrl+C / Cmd+C to copy selected cells as tab-separated text
• Right-click context menu for copy, select row, select column, select all

Editing (CSV/TSV only)

• Click the Edit button in the toolbar to enter edit mode
• Double-click a cell, press Enter, or choose Edit cell from the right-click menu to edit its value
• Enter confirms and moves to the cell below; Tab moves right
• Shift+Enter or Alt+Enter inserts a line break within a cell
• Escape cancels the current edit
• Ctrl+S / Cmd+S saves all changes back to the file
• Edited cells are highlighted with a different background color until saved
• When exiting edit mode with unsaved changes, you're prompted to save or discard
• Unsaved changes are cached, so you won't lose your work if you close the tab, window, or app
• If the file changes on disk while you have unsaved edits, a banner appears. Conflicted edits — where the underlying cell also changed externally — are flagged with warning-colored text on top of the usual background highlight; you can keep all edits, discard only the conflicted ones, or discard all

Usage

Excel files open automatically in Table Viewer when you open an .xlsx or .xls file.

CSV/TSV files open in VS Code's built-in text editor. Two buttons appear in the editor title bar:

• The preview icon opens a read-only synced side-by-side preview (alt-click opens it in the same tab)
• The table icon opens the file as a standalone table view (use this if you want to edit)

Default editor behavior

Table Viewer registers as the default editor for Excel files (.xlsx, .xls) because VS Code's built-in text editor isn't useful for binary Excel data. If you have another Excel viewer installed, VS Code will ask which one you'd like to use.

For CSV and TSV files, Table Viewer does not register as the default editor. This preserves VS Code's normal text editing behavior — you can still edit CSV/TSV files as text, use find-and-replace, and so on. The table view is available via the toolbar buttons described above.

If you'd prefer Table Viewer to open CSV/TSV files directly, add this to your settings.json:

"workbench.editorAssociations": {
    "*.csv": "tableViewer.editor",
    "*.tsv": "tableViewer.editor"
}

Settings

License

GPL-3.0