A Sophisticated CSV Editor/Viewer
for Windows, Mac, and Linux
Modern CSV is a powerful tabular file editor/viewer application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Professionals at all levels of technical proficiency use it to analyze data, check files for uploading to databases, modify configuration files, maintain customer lists, and more. We designed it to compensate for the deficiencies of spreadsheet programs in handling CSV/TSV/DSV/etc. files. We strive to create a user experience our customers describe as “blissful”.
Edit CSV Files with Ease
Why should it be difficult to move a column around, duplicate a row, or split cells? With Modern CSV, it’s easy.
With most commands, you can operate on multiple rows, columns, or cells at once. This makes repetitive actions effortless.
Most commands have a keyboard shortcut. If a command doesn’t have one or you don’t like the default, you can make your own shortcut.
Find and Arrange Your CSV Data
The Find/Replace feature has all the options you need to find what you’re looking for. It can also highlight matches as you type or preview Replace operations before you do them.
If you need to sort a column, double click the column label. It uses stable sort so the order of the other columns is preserved as much as possible.
Filters use a powerful syntax that is clearly described in the filter query.
Finally, you can manually hide whichever rows or columns you want. All you have to do is select and call the hide command.
View Large CSV Files Quickly
Modern CSV is not only a powerful CSV editor, it’s also a powerful CSV viewer. It comes with a read-only mode that loads large files quickly and with a small memory footprint just a fraction of the file size. In fact, it can load up to 11 times faster than Excel.
A Fully Customizable CSV Editor
We designed Modern CSV to be an application that is comfortable to use. To view your CSV files more easily, you can pick a the theme from 5 options, change cell sizes, or shade every other row or column.
For the keyboard ninjas, we gave most commands keyboard shortcuts that you can set to your liking.
You can also tell it how to handle files of different extensions. Do your .csv files have semi-colon delimiters in ANSI (Windows-1252, Western European) character encoding with CRLF newline characters? You can have it open and save files accordingly every time.
Additional Capabilites
- Multiple delimiters supported (TSV, PSV, TAB, etc.)
- Multiple character encodings supported (UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO 8859, Windows-125x, CJK, etc.)
- Multiple line endings supported (CRLF or LF)
- Native Apple Silicon (M1/M2) support
- Delimiter Auto-Detect
Drag and drop files or folders - Freeze header rows/columns so they’re always visible
- Auto-refresh when files are edited externally (optional)
- RFC 4180 compliant (optional)
- Fuzzy search for all commands and files
- Drag and drop groups of cells, rows, or columns
- Handles poorly formatted files
- Save results of filtering, sorting, etc. into separate files
- Convert date/time formats (Premium feature)
- Transpose entire tables or segments of a table (Premium feature)
- Text case conversion (Premium feature)
- Duplicate, rename or delete files from within the program (Premium feature)
- Basic file analysis (Premium Business feature)
- Column lookup (Premium Business feature)
What Our Users Say
"The most consistent and wonderful experience."
Having tried almost every CSV editor I could find, Modern CSV by far gives the most consistent and wonderful experience.
If you’re a programmer (who uses keyboard more often), you will be happy to find out there is a quick access to the command list you can type in and the ability to customize every shortcut, which makes editing so blissful.
- Umar A.
"Easy interface, very logical and fast"
I often have very large files which are impossible to manipulate using standard Office tools. This is such an easy interface, very logical and fast — it makes the task of extracting data less daunting. Kudos for great support, too. Now the rest of my team wants their own copies!
- Wendy C.
"The best!"
I use Modern CSV everyday and it is the best! I recommend it to everyone I know who works with data files. Thanks for the great software!
- Scott K.
"Blows Excel out of the water"
Very nice app you have here. I bought it within 10 seconds of finding it. Light weight, opens fast, isn’t bloated. So you’ve basically just blown excel out of the water.
- Thomas K.
"An outstanding product!"
I have tried so many different csv viewing/editing software for so many years (I have been programming for about 25 years) and have never found anything that checks all the boxes for me when working on complex software projects…UNTIL I FOUND MODERN CSV!
You have created an outstanding product!
- David A.
"I could not live without it."
I have been using Modern CSV for more than a year now and, as a data scientist in Digital Humanities, I could not live without it.
The ubiquitous open data exchange format is CSV. Excel and LibreOffice Calc are capable to read and save CSV data, but they reach their limits very fast — mostly when dealing with big amounts of data. This is precisely where Modern CSV has carved its niche: dealing with vast amounts of CSV data, transform them fast, and extract them to another data set.
An indispensable tool, highly recommended.
- Stephen S.
"Took away a huge pain-point."
I inherited an ETL system that used a set of CSV files to “program” the ETL process. The CSV files varied in size from a 10s to 100s of rows, each one needing to be lovingly entered by hand.
I’m no stranger to CSV. I’ve been wrangling data for decades. I can slap together pipelines using xsv, perl, sed, csvkit, awk, grep, and countless other CLI utilities in my sleep. I can chew through 100s of GB of data without batting an eye.
But hand-editing individual rows in CSV files has _always_ been a headache. Excel and other spreadsheet programs just mangle CSV format. Plaintext editors are a nuisance and I end up playing “count the commas”. I found a terminal-based editor, but its keybindings were beyond my comprehension and I frequently destroyed my CSV files.
I was loathing the idea of starting a project with this ETL system, and I googled “CSV editor” as I had a thousand times before expecting only disappointment. This time, though, SEO worked its magic and ModernCSV came up on the first page. With a great deal of skepticism, I downloaded the “free trial” and fired up the editor. Within seconds I felt at home, able to easily navigate around and edit individual cells. The interface for editing multiple cells, cutting/pasting, and filtering felt intuitive and, well, modern.
ModernCSV took away a huge pain-point for me on this project. ModernCSV does its job well so that, rather than wrestling with tools that treat CSV manipulation as an afterthought, I can instead wrestle with the important parts of my project. Tools are supposed to act as an extension of ourselves to make a certain task easier. ModernCSV does just that for CSV editing, and I can’t think of higher praise than that.
- Ryan D.
"Superbly designed and highly functional."
Over the years, I’ve often had to deal with tables of data, I’ve used many different programs to deal with them, including Microsoft “Excel”, Open Office “Calc” and even Libre Office “Calc”; they all work – sort of, anyway.
They’re all large, “Swiss Army Knife” solutions. Kind of like using a handgun to kill a mosquito.
Earlier this year, I was drafted into yet another project where I had to edit and organize a large amount of textual data, and those “big programs” kept corrupting the data by adding their own information.
In frustration, I searched (again!) for a better solution for working with files of “comma separated values” and I stumbled on Modern CSV.
There was a trial available, so I gave it a try, especially since they have a FREE version.
It was amazing! It did pretty much exactly what I needed, although there were a few things that would have made my job easier, so I sent a note to the Evan– a feature request.
If I remember right, he responded the very same day, and my request was added to the next version. It does what is needed better than anything else I’ve ever seen.
While I had not reason to buy a license (the free version did what I needed), I strongly believe in acknowledging work that is above and beyond the expected. Modern CSV certainly did that, and the license wasn’t prohibitively expensive, so I bought one – my way of saying “Thank You” to Evan.
If you deal with CSV files, try this program. It is superbly designed and highly functional, with a small system footprint.
- Rob W.
License Terms
By downloading, installing, and using Modern CSV, you agree to the license terms.