Open Excel Online

1. 1

   Choose a workbook

   Drag a file onto the drop area or press Browse. XLSX, XLSM, XLTX, XLTM, XLSB, XLS and ODS all open; everything runs on your device, not our servers.

2. 2

   Read the sheet

   The grid opens on the first sheet with its fills, fonts, borders, number formats, merged cells and frozen panes in place. Scroll to any row — nothing is cropped. Use the sheet tabs to move between sheets.

3. 3

   Find and inspect

   Search the sheet or the whole workbook, jump to a cell or a named range, and select a range to see its sum, average, count, minimum and maximum. The formula bar shows the stored formula behind any cell.

4. 4

   Export or print

   Download the sheet as CSV, TSV or JSON, take every sheet at once as a ZIP, copy a selection to the clipboard, or print the view.

A spreadsheet is a document with structure — a frozen header, a highlighted total, a column of dates, a formula behind a number. This viewer reads all of it and puts every row within reach.

• Every row, every sheet. There is no preview cap and no cropped quick view. A hundred-thousand-row ledger scrolls the same way a ten-row list does, because only the cells on screen are ever drawn.
• Formatting kept. Fills, font family, size, weight and colour, per-side borders, alignment, indent and wrapping, column widths and row heights are read from the file and drawn as set.
• Number formats applied. A date column reads as dates, a currency column carries its symbol and separators, a percentage shows a percent sign, and a format that turns negatives red turns them red.
• Frozen panes and merges. A header row that was frozen stays put while the data scrolls under it, and merged cells render as one cell across their span.
• Hidden rows and columns. They stay hidden, exactly as the author left them, with a marker in the header so you can see something was collapsed — and one switch reveals them.
• Conditional formatting. Colour scales, data bars and comparison rules are evaluated and drawn, so a heat map still reads as a heat map.
• Formula bar and cell inspector. Select a cell to see its address, its stored formula, its raw value, the number format applied to it, and any hyperlink or merge it belongs to.
• Selection statistics. Drag a range to get its sum, average, count, minimum and maximum — the status-bar arithmetic that is the most-used reading tool in any spreadsheet.
• Export what you are reading. CSV, TSV or JSON for the sheet or just the selection, every sheet at once as a ZIP, a selection copied to the clipboard, or a printed page.

Most people who need to read a spreadsheet do not need to edit one. They have been sent a file and they want to look at it — on a laptop without Excel, on a borrowed machine, on a phone, or on a work computer where installing software is not an option.

Benefits of an online viewer

• No installation. Open the page and drop the file.
• Nothing is uploaded. The workbook is read on your device. Server-side viewers keep your file for hours after you close the tab; this one never receives it.
• No daily quota. Open as many workbooks as you like, as often as you like. Free online viewers commonly cap you at a handful of files a day and a couple of megabytes each.
• Works offline. Once the page has loaded, it keeps working with the network switched off.
• Reads what Excel wrote. Macro-enabled workbooks, template files, the binary XLSB format, the old XLS format and OpenDocument spreadsheets all open in the same grid.

Size is where most spreadsheet viewers quietly give up. They build a table of every cell, the page stops responding, and the honest ones crop the sheet to a few dozen rows and call it a preview. That is the difference between looking at a file and reading it.

How this viewer handles size

• The screen decides the work. Drawing costs the number of cells in the window, not the number of cells in the sheet, so scrolling to row 100,000 costs exactly what scrolling to row 10 costs.
• Reading starts before loading finishes. The first rows appear as soon as they have been read, and the rest arrive underneath while you are already looking at the top of the sheet.
• The page keeps responding. The workbook is read away from the part of the browser that draws the page, so the tab never freezes while a large file opens.
• Memory stays modest. Cell values are kept in a compact form rather than as one object per cell, which is what makes a very large ledger practical on an ordinary laptop.

A spreadsheet you cannot search is a spreadsheet you have to scroll. Search here covers the sheet you are on or every sheet in the file, and it reports the true number of matches rather than stopping at a round number.

Search and navigation

• Whole-workbook search. Switch the scope and every sheet is searched; stepping through matches moves between sheets on its own.
• Match case and whole cell. Narrow a search to exact matches when a short term appears inside longer values.
• Search inside formulas. Find every cell that references a function or a range, which is how you trace where a number came from.
• Go to a cell or a named range. Type an address like B24, or the name of a range the author defined, and the grid jumps there and selects it.
• Keyboard movement. Arrow keys move a cell, Ctrl with an arrow jumps to the edge, Page Up and Page Down move a screen, and Ctrl+Home returns to the top.

The number in a cell is often not the whole story. A total may be a formula, a date is stored as a number and shown as a date, and a red figure is red because of a format rule rather than because someone coloured it in.

What the inspector shows

• The stored formula. The expression the author wrote, alongside the result that was saved with the file.
• The raw value. What the cell actually holds, which for a date is a serial number and for a percentage is a fraction.
• The number format. The format code that turns that raw value into what you see, so you can tell a formatted number from typed text.
• Merges and links. Whether the cell is part of a merged range, and where any hyperlink on it points.
• Selection arithmetic. Sum, average, count, minimum and maximum for any range you drag, updating as you drag it.

Reading is often the first half of the job. Take the sheet away as data, or put it on paper, without opening a second tool.

Ways to take the data with you

• CSV, TSV or JSON. The current sheet, or only the cells you selected, in the delimiter or structure you need.
• Displayed or raw. Exports use the text you can see by default — dates as dates — with a switch for the underlying values when you are going to compute on them.
• Every sheet at once. One ZIP containing every sheet as its own file, named after the sheet.
• Copy a selection. A dragged range goes to the clipboard as tab-separated text, which pastes back into any spreadsheet with its columns intact.
• Print the view. The sheet prints as it is drawn, with its formatting.

Excel has written several different files over the years, and the extension is the only visible clue as to which one you have. All of the ones below open in the same grid.

What each extension is

• XLSX. The modern format, used by Excel 2007 and everything after it. It is a compressed package of XML parts describing cells, styles and sheets.
• XLSM. The same format with macros stored alongside the data. The macros are never executed here — the viewer reads cells, not code.
• XLTX and XLTM. Template files. They share the XLSX part structure exactly, so they open like any workbook.
• XLSB. The binary variant. Faster for Excel to write on very large files, and unreadable by most online viewers.
• XLS. The Excel 97-2003 format, a binary file with a different structure entirely. Still common in exports from older systems.
• ODS. The OpenDocument spreadsheet written by LibreOffice, OpenOffice and several online suites.

A viewer that is vague about its limits leaves you to discover them. These are stated up front.

Worth knowing

• Formulas are shown, not recalculated. You see the expression the author wrote and the result that was saved with the file — which is what the file says the answer is. Recalculating would require a spreadsheet engine, and would risk showing a number the file does not contain.
• Charts and pictures are not drawn. The cell data behind a chart is all there and readable; the chart itself and any embedded images are not rendered.
• Pivot tables show their saved range. What appears is the cached result stored in the file, which is what Excel displays until the pivot is refreshed.
• Password-protected workbooks. An encrypted workbook is detected and named as such rather than failing obscurely. Open it in Excel and save a copy without a password to read it here.
• Formula-driven format rules. Conditional formatting based on a comparison, a colour scale or a data bar is drawn. Rules driven by a spreadsheet formula are counted and reported rather than guessed at, because a cell coloured for the wrong reason is worse than one that is not coloured.

Everything described on this page happens on the machine in front of you. The file is opened where it already is, and the page does the reading.

What that means in practice

• No upload, so no wait. There is no transfer to sit through before a workbook opens, and no download afterwards to collect a result.
• No copy is kept. Nothing is stored, cached on a server, or deleted-after-24-hours, because nothing was ever sent.
• Your device sets the ceiling. How large a workbook you can open depends on your own machine rather than on someone's upload limit.
• Reading is separated from drawing. The heavy work of reading a workbook runs away from the part of the browser that paints the page, so the interface stays responsive while a large file loads.

A few habits make a large or unfamiliar spreadsheet much quicker to read.

Reading tips

• Start with the sheet tabs. A workbook's structure is usually in its tab names; hidden sheets are marked, so you can see what the author kept out of the way.
• Select a column before judging it. The sum, average and count of a dragged range tell you more about a column than reading its first ten values.
• Check the format before trusting a number. The inspector shows whether a value is a number, a date, text that looks like a number, or an error.
• Search formulas to trace a total. Searching inside formulas finds every cell that references a range, which is the fastest way to see how a figure was built.
• Export the selection, not the sheet. When you only need part of a table, exporting the selection saves cleaning the file up afterwards.

Common use cases

• A file arrived and you have no Excel. Open it, read it, and export the part you need.
• Checking a supplier's export. Look at the number formats and hidden columns before importing it anywhere.
• Reading on a phone. Pinch-free zoom and a real scrollbar make a wide sheet legible on a small screen.
• Auditing a workbook you inherited. Hidden sheets, hidden columns, defined names and formulas are all visible instead of buried.
• Converting one sheet, not the workbook. Export a single sheet as CSV or JSON without splitting the file first.

• Excel to CSV
• Excel to PDF
• Excel to JSON
• Excel to HTML
• Merge Excel files
• Split Excel sheets