SmartQueryTools

TSV Tools

19 free TSV tools. All run in your browser, with no uploads and no account.

Convert TSV to another format

Convert other formats to TSV

View, inspect and query TSV files

TSV Format Comparisons

About TSV

TSV (Tab-Separated Values) is a plain-text tabular format that uses tab characters as delimiters instead of commas. It behaves identically to CSV in every other respect — one row per line, first line usually headers — but avoids the quoting complexity that arises when data values contain commas. If your data includes addresses, descriptions, monetary values, or any free-text fields with commas, TSV eliminates an entire class of parsing errors.

Bioinformaticians and genomics researchers use TSV heavily — standard formats like BED, GFF, GTF, VCF, and BLAST output are all tab-delimited. Legacy enterprise systems, certain database export tools, and Unix utilities like cut, awk, and paste also default to tab-delimited output. TSV is the quiet workhorse of scientific computing and legacy data pipelines.

The main limitation of TSV is narrower tool support compared to CSV — many databases and analytics platforms need the delimiter explicitly specified and default to comma if not told otherwise. Our TSV tools let you convert between TSV and CSV, apply the same filtering, sorting, deduplication, and transformation operations available for CSV, and export results in whatever format your downstream tool expects.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is TSV different from CSV?

The only difference is the delimiter character. CSV uses a comma; TSV uses a tab. TSV avoids the need to quote values that contain commas, but values containing tabs still need quoting. In practice, tab characters appear far less often in real-world data than commas, which is why TSV is preferred for data that includes addresses, descriptions, or any free-text content.

Can I open a TSV file in Excel?

Yes. Excel recognises .tsv files and imports them with the tab delimiter automatically. For .txt files with tab delimiters, you may need to use Excel's Import Wizard and specify the tab delimiter. Alternatively, convert to CSV first using the TSV to CSV tool here, and Excel will open it directly.

What bioinformatics formats use TSV?

BED (Browser Extensible Data), GFF/GTF (General Feature Format), VCF (Variant Call Format), SAM (Sequence Alignment Map), BLAST tabular output, and many other standard bioinformatics formats are tab-delimited. DuckDB can query these files directly via the SQL Query tool if you specify the tab delimiter in your query.

More TSV operations

Every CSV operation also works directly on TSV files:

Remove duplicates · Filter · Sort · Split · Sample · Select columns · Rename · Merge · Trim · Fill empty values · Transpose · Change delimiter · First N rows · Last N rows · Add row numbers · Validate structure · Count by value · Unique values · Compare · Format timestamps · Find & replace · Split column · Combine columns · Convert case · Aggregate · Round numbers · Conditional column · Regex extract · Parse dates · Compare schemas · Change column types · Unpivot · Repair file · Convert encoding · Shuffle · Bin column · Calculated column · Extract JSON column · Date difference · Normalize · Rank · Running total · Detect outliers · Validate emails · Moving average · Search text · Top N per group · Percent of total · Parse URLs · Lag / lead · Filter by date range · Correlation matrix · Fuzzy deduplicate · Hash columns · Group concatenate · Truncate dates · Coalesce columns · Add UUID column · Pad column · Percentile · Arg max / min