Excel Viewer

How to open an Excel file without Excel

1. Drop your spreadsheet on the drop zone, or click it to choose a file. This tool reads .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb and old .xls Excel workbooks, as well as .ods files from LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
2. Choose the Sheet to display. Hidden sheets are listed too, marked as hidden.
3. Browse the rows page by page, with Excel-style column letters and row numbers. Use Search this sheet to show only the rows containing a word or a number, and Rows per page to see more at once.
4. Tick Show formulas instead of values to see the formula behind each calculated cell.
5. To reuse the data elsewhere, choose a Delimiter under Export this sheet and click Download CSV.

The workbook is opened by JavaScript in your browser tab. It is never uploaded, so you can view payroll files, budgets or client lists on a computer without Office, a Chromebook or a borrowed device without handing the data to anyone.

What you see, and what you don’t

This viewer shows the content of the cells, formatted the way the file says: dates, percentages, currencies and decimals appear as in Excel when the file stores that format. It is built on SheetJS Community Edition, which reads the data but not the presentation. As a result:

• Formulas show their cached values: the result that Excel or LibreOffice calculated and saved in the file the last time it was saved. Nothing is recalculated here. A file produced by a program that doesn’t save results may show empty cells where formulas are; tick Show formulas instead of values to see them.
• Macros never run. VBA code in .xlsm files is not even loaded, so opening a file here can’t trigger a macro.
• Fonts, fill colours, borders, conditional formatting, column widths, charts, images, comments and pivot table layouts are not displayed.
• Merged cells show their content in the top-left cell only; the note above the table tells you how many merged ranges the sheet contains.
• Password-protected (encrypted) workbooks can’t be opened. Remove the password in your spreadsheet program and save a copy first.

The note above the table also gives the used range (for example A1:H250) and the number of formula cells. Empty rows and columns around the data are skipped, even when the file declares a much larger range.

Exporting a sheet to CSV

Download CSV saves the whole current sheet (not only the rows matching the search) as a text file with the chosen delimiter: comma for most programs, semicolon for spreadsheets set to French or another language that uses a decimal comma. Values are exported as displayed. Protect against formula injection prefixes cells starting with =, +, - or @ with an apostrophe so another spreadsheet won’t run them as formulas; plain numbers are kept as they are. Tick Add a UTF-8 BOM if the CSV will be opened in Excel and contains accents.