XLS to TSV, tab separated text from legacy Excel files

Tabs almost never appear inside spreadsheet cells, which makes TSV more robust than CSV for data full of commas: addresses, product descriptions, free text notes. Database bulk loaders, command line tools and scientific software often take TSV by default.

This converter reads the old binary Excel format directly. For the newer format use XLSX to TSV, and if the target needs commas or semicolons after all, see XLS to CSV or XLS to CSV with semicolons.

How to convert XLS to TSV in three steps

1. 1Upload the .xls file.
2. 2Pick the sheet, encoding and date format.
3. 3Convert and download the .tsv file or a ZIP with one file per sheet.

Tabs, line breaks and quoting in TSV files

The appeal of TSV is that most values need no quoting. The catch is the rare cell that does contain a tab or a line break, typically a note pasted from an email. Strict TSV readers have no quoting rules at all, so a tab inside a cell shifts every following column. The converter wraps such a cell in quotes, which spreadsheet apps and most loaders read correctly, and the Trim option cleans stray spaces before export.

Old XLS files carry their own quirks. Text is stored in a regional code page, dates are serial numbers counted from 1900 (or from 1904 in files created on old Macs), and a sheet holds at most 65,536 rows. The converter writes dates in the format you choose (ISO 8601, US or EU), so the receiving system never has to guess the day and month order.

Numbers are written as displayed, so leading zeros in codes survive. If your tool needs typed values rather than text, XLS to JSON keeps numbers as numbers, and XLS to SQL writes a script directly. To go back into a workbook later, use TSV to XLSX.