Excel Lite

Open, read and edit Excel and CSV files without leaving VS Code — and without quietly rewriting the parts of your workbook you never touched.

Why Excel Lite

Most spreadsheet viewers rebuild the file when they save it. Anything they don't model — other worksheets, formulas, merged cells, charts, number formats — is gone the moment you edit one cell.

Excel Lite patches the original file instead of rebuilding it. It tracks exactly which cells you changed and writes back only those, so everything else survives byte for byte:

• other worksheets, formulas, merged cells, frozen panes;
• number formats, column widths, borders, conditional formatting, charts, images.

CSV files keep their delimiter, line endings, BOM and blank lines, so editing one cell shows up in git diff as one changed line — not the whole file.

Features

Read any sheet, fast

The grid is virtualised: only the rows on screen exist in the DOM, and the extension streams a window of rows at a time. Files with hundreds of thousands of rows open instantly and scroll smoothly.

• .xlsx, .xlsm, .csv and .tsv, with tabs for multi-sheet workbooks.
• Values keep their type — numbers stay numeric, dates render as YYYY-MM-DD, and formulas show their result rather than [object Object].
• Status bar shows SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX and COUNT for the selection.

Sort and filter like a spreadsheet

• Click a header to cycle ascending → descending → unsorted.
• Filter by value (searchable checklist of every distinct value), by condition (contains, starts with, is empty, >, <, between, and their negations) or by fill colour.
• Sorting is type-aware: numbers sort numerically, dates chronologically, and blanks always sort last.

Find and replace

Ctrl+F opens find and replace, with match-case, whole-cell matching, F3 to step through hits, and replace-all as a single undo step.

Matching runs against the text the cell editor shows, so a formula matches on its expression rather than its cached result — and a replacement round-trips back into a formula instead of freezing it to a value.

Edit with real spreadsheet ergonomics

• Insert and delete rows and columns from the right-click menu on a row number or column header.
• A formula bar shows the selected cell's reference and true contents.
• Full keyboard navigation: arrows, Tab, Enter, Page Up/Down, Home/End, Ctrl+A, Delete to clear, or just start typing to replace a cell.
• Copy, cut and paste interoperate with Excel and Google Sheets, including multi-line quoted cells. Pasting past the last row grows the sheet.
• Bold, italic, underline, text colour, fill colour and alignment — all round-tripping into the file.

Saves you can trust

• The tab shows a dirty indicator; Ctrl+S saves; closing with unsaved changes prompts you, and unsaved work survives a restart.
• Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y use VS Code's own undo stack.
• If the file changed on disk since you opened it, saving asks before overwriting. A clean file that changes on disk reloads automatically.
• Optional Auto Save.

Follows your theme

The grid inherits your VS Code theme by default, with an explicit light/dark override available from the toolbar's ⋯ menu.

Keyboard shortcuts

Getting started

1. Open any .xlsx, .xlsm, .csv or .tsv file — Excel Lite is the default editor for those types.
2. Edit, format, sort and filter, then Ctrl+S.

To open a file as raw text instead, right-click it and choose Open With… → Text Editor.

Known limitations

• Legacy .xls (the pre-2007 binary format) is not supported. Open it in Excel or LibreOffice and re-save as .xlsx.
• Formulas are preserved but not recalculated — editing a cell does not update formulas that depend on it until the file is reopened in Excel.
• Row and column insert/delete are unavailable while a sort or filter is active, because view order and sheet order would disagree about which row is which. Clear them first.
• Adding, deleting or reordering worksheets is not yet supported (renaming is).

Release notes

See CHANGELOG.md for the full history.

Author

Rahul Raghunath Bodanki

• GitHub
• Portfolio

Issues and feature requests are welcome on the issue tracker.

Development

npm install
npm run watch   # rebuilds the extension and webview bundles
npm test        # 153 unit, round-trip and end-to-end tests

Press F5 in VS Code to launch the Extension Development Host. See BUILD.md for architecture and packaging notes.

License

Apache-2.0