Spreadsheet Editor for CSV, Excel & XLSX

Edit CSV, TSV and Excel files in VS Code as a spreadsheet, with real undo, real save and files of a million rows. Free, no sign-in, works offline.

A real CSV of the week's earthquakes from USGS open in Spreadsheet Editor in VS Code. The edited cells are green, the tab shows unsaved changes, and the status bar shows 1,770 rows, UTF-8, comma and LF.

Type in a cell, press Enter, and the tab shows a dot until you save. Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+S, Revert and hot exit are VS Code's own.
Rows you did not touch are saved byte for byte: delimiter, quotes, encoding, BOM and line endings stay as they were.
1,000,000-row CSV: opens in about 2 seconds and saves in about 1.3 seconds. A 200 MB file with 5.6 million rows opens in under 3 seconds.
Excel .xlsx: change values and rows, and styles, number formats, merged cells, formulas and the other sheets stay.
Find and replace with match case, regex and whole cell. Filter rows by text or with a SQL condition.
Any delimiter (comma, semicolon, tab, pipe, or one you type), quote character, 13 encodings, comment lines.

Why this one

People who edit CSV files in VS Code report the same problems again and again. This editor was built and tested against each of them. The numbers come from a real VS Code 1.142 run on real files (the test log is in the repository).

What users report	What Spreadsheet Editor does	Measured
"I have lost data a few times now when I thought the data was saved" (review, April 2025); requests for a data loss warning and a focused cell that is not saved by Ctrl+S	Every edit goes into VS Code's own edit stack. The tab shows unsaved changes, Ctrl+S writes the file, closing asks first, and hot exit keeps unsaved edits across a restart. A file changed on disk while you edit is never overwritten without asking.	Edit, save, close and reopen: the change is there. Reload the window with unsaved edits: they come back. Change the file outside while editing: a note shows and Save asks "Overwrite" or "Save As".
"didn't work well with bigger CSV files" (review, August 2023); files over 50 MB not supported, opening files bigger than 50 MB	The file stays as bytes with an index of where each row starts. Only the rows on screen are decoded. Saving copies untouched rows and writes edited ones.	1,000,000 rows (38 MB): open 1.9 s, save 1.3 s, extension host 211 MB. 200 MB, 5.6 million rows: open 2.7 s, save 1.8 s, 585 MB.
"If you save the file, there is no history back" (review, October 2023); moving columns breaks undo	Undo and redo work before and after a save, for cells, rows, columns, moves, paste, fill down and Replace All (one step each).	50 edits, 50 undos: the file is byte-identical to the original. 50 redos: all 50 cells come back.
"no custom separators, no custom comment prefix, ctrl+f barely usable" (review, October 2025)	Pick or type any one-character delimiter, a quote character and a comment prefix (#, // or ;). Ctrl+F (Cmd+F) opens find and replace with regex.	Semicolon, tab, pipe, UTF-16 and Windows-1252 files open with the right settings found on their own.

The file was changed on disk while it had unsaved edits. A note says the edits are kept, and Save asks: Save As, Cancel or Overwrite.

Edit

Click a cell and type. Enter moves down, Tab moves right, Escape cancels. F2 or a double-click edits the text that is there. Alt+Enter adds a line break inside a cell.
Right-click a cell, a row number or a column header to insert, delete or move rows and columns, rename a column, fill down, copy or clear. Alt+Up and Alt+Down move the selected rows. Alt+Left and Alt+Right move a column.
Paste a block copied from Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice. It fills the cells from the selected one and adds rows and columns when it needs them. One value pasted on a selected range fills the whole range.
Ctrl+D fills down: the first selected row is copied into the rows below it.
Delete clears the selected cells. Ctrl+C copies them as tab-separated text for any spreadsheet.
Edited cells are green and new rows have a + in the margin, so you can see what will be saved.
The status bar shows the sum, average and count of the selected numbers.

Find, filter and sort

Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) opens find and replace. Turn on match case, regular expressions or whole cell. Replace All works on the rows shown or on the selection only, and $1 puts back a regex group.
The Filter rows box shows the rows that contain some text. The SQL box takes a condition such as price > 10 AND city LIKE 'Par%', with AND, OR, NOT, IN, BETWEEN, LIKE and IS NULL.
Click the arrows in a header to sort. Sorting and filtering change the view only. The file keeps its order until you move rows yourself.
Right-click a header and pick Column stats for count, empty cells, distinct values, sum, mean, min and max.

Find and replace open over a real CSV of country codes, with match case, regex and whole cell buttons.

What a CSV save keeps

Every row you did not change, byte for byte. A test edits one cell in a 1,000,000-row file and checks that all other bytes are the same.
The delimiter, the quote character, quoting of every field in files that quote everything, and the line ending of each row (mixed files stay mixed; new rows use the most common one).
The encoding and the byte order mark: UTF-8, UTF-16 LE and BE, Windows-1252, 1250 and 1251, ISO-8859-15, KOI8-R, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, GB18030, Big5 and EUC-KR. If you type a character that the encoding cannot hold, the save stops and offers a UTF-8 copy.
Comment lines stay where they are, as they are.
A save writes a temporary file next to yours and then renames it, so a failed save never leaves a half-written file.

A 1,000,000-row CSV after an edit to its last row. The status bar shows 1,000,000 rows and the time the save took.

What an Excel save keeps

Cell values you change are written with their type: numbers stay numbers, text that starts with = becomes a formula, and dates in date cells stay dates.
Kept: styles, number formats, merged cells, column widths, formulas, hidden sheets and every other sheet. Excel calculates the formulas again when it opens the file.
Not kept: pivot tables, charts, shapes, slicers and macros. Before the first save of a workbook that has them, a note lists them and offers Save a Copy, so the original stays as it was.
Macro workbooks (.xlsm) are never written in place. Your edits go to a new .xlsx copy, and the .xlsm file is not changed.
Workbooks up to 40 MB open for editing. Zip bombs and damaged files are refused before they are unpacked.

A workbook in the light theme with its Budget, Staff and hidden sheet tabs. Formula cells are marked fx.

Open files

.xlsx and .xlsm files open in Spreadsheet Editor when you click them.
For .csv, .tsv, .tab and .psv files, click the table icon in the editor title or right-click the file and pick Open in Spreadsheet Editor. To open them here every time, run "Spreadsheet Editor: Make Spreadsheet Editor the Default for CSV and TSV". Open as Text in the editor title switches back for one file.
CSV files up to 512 MB open for editing and up to 1 GB read-only. Both limits are settings, and you can lower them. Zovo Pro raises them (below).

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
`spreadsheetEditor.maxEditSizeMB`	512	CSV files up to this size open for editing.
`spreadsheetEditor.maxFileSizeMB`	1024	CSV files up to this size open read-only.
`spreadsheetEditor.maxExcelSizeMB`	40	Workbooks up to this size open for editing.
`spreadsheetEditor.maxExcelCells`	5000000	Cell limit for a workbook, all sheets together.
`spreadsheetEditor.maxCopyRows`	200000	Rows copied to the clipboard at once.
`spreadsheetEditor.autoReload`	true	Read the file again when it changes on disk and you have no unsaved edits.
`spreadsheetEditor.askForRating`	true	One rating question after a few good uses. Never after an error.
`spreadsheetEditor.showSupportLinks`	true	The small Rate, More free viewers and Sponsor links in the status bar.

Without Zovo Pro, a size setting above its default works as the default.

Privacy

The extension makes no network calls on its own. Files are read and written on your computer, and nothing about them is sent anywhere. The one exception is Zovo Pro: when you click to unlock it with GitHub Sponsors, it asks GitHub once whether you are a sponsor. There is no telemetry and no account. It needs VS Code 1.90 or later, so it also installs in Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium.

Zovo Pro

Everything above is free, with no limit on rows, edits or saves, and no ads. Everything that is free stays free.

Zovo Pro is USD 19 once. It turns on the Pro tools in all Zovo extensions. In this one there are three:

Find and Replace in CSV Files: replace text in every CSV and TSV file of the workspace at once, with match case, regex and whole cell. Rows that do not change stay byte for byte, and files with unsaved edits are skipped.
Edit files past the free size limits: CSV files over 512 MB open for editing (up to 2,000 MB), and workbooks over 40 MB open (up to 200 MB). Without Pro such a file opens read-only or not at all, as before, and the note has a button to open it with Pro.
Save filtered rows as a new file: the rows that the filter or SQL condition shows, in their sorted order, go to a new CSV, TSV or XLSX file that you pick. The open file is not changed.

Each Pro tool has 3 free tries on this computer. A try is used only when the tool did its work (a replacement written, a large file opened, a new file saved). Cancel or Escape never uses one. Nothing about Pro shows until you click a Pro tool. The Pro panel offers "Pay by card (USD 19)" first (the key shows on the page right after payment), then GitHub Sponsors, PayPal and "Enter a key". The same ways are in the Command Palette under "Zovo Pro".

Support Zovo

Zovo Pro: USD 19 once, every Zovo viewer. Get Zovo Pro on GitHub Sponsors to turn on the Pro tools in this extension and in the other Zovo extensions you use. The free features stay free.

Zovo extensions have no ads and no tracking. They are made by theluckystrike on GitHub. You can also support the work with no Pro:

Need your format supported?

Open a format request with a sample file, and I reply there whether it can be done. For USD 299 once, through this GitHub Sponsors tier, I add your file format or a missing feature to this extension, with tests, within 7 days.

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See all Zovo extensions on the Marketplace.

License

MIT. Third-party licenses are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

Spreadsheet Editor for CSV, Excel & XLSX - Edit Large Files, SQL Filter

Zovo