Open files in VS Code and Cursor / Tables and data

Edit CSV files in VS Code as a spreadsheet

VS Code opens a CSV file as plain text. To edit it as a grid, install the free Spreadsheet Editor by Zovo, open the file and click the table icon in the editor title. Type in a cell, press Enter, and save with Ctrl+S. Undo, save, revert and hot exit are VS Code's own, and rows you did not touch are saved byte for byte.

Free, MIT license. Extension ID zovo.zovo-spreadsheet-editor, version 0.1.1. Needs VS Code 1.90.0 or newer.

Also free from Zovo: XLSX, Excel, CSV & Parquet Viewer, VS Code Marketplace · Open VSX (Cursor, Windsurf).

Steps in VS Code

1. Install Spreadsheet Editor from the Marketplace, or press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on macOS) and run ext install zovo.zovo-spreadsheet-editor.
2. Open a .csv, .tsv, .tab or .psv file and click the table icon in the editor title, or right-click the file and pick "Open in Spreadsheet Editor". .xlsx and .xlsm files open in it when you click them.
3. Click a cell and type. Enter moves down and Tab moves right. Right-click a row number or a column header to insert, delete or move rows and columns.
4. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on macOS) for find and replace with match case, regex and whole cell. Type a condition such as price > 10 AND city LIKE 'Par%' in the SQL box to filter rows.
5. Press Ctrl+S to save. To open CSV files in the grid every time, run "Spreadsheet Editor: Make Spreadsheet Editor the Default for CSV and TSV".

Steps in Cursor, Windsurf or VSCodium

1. Open the Extensions view with Ctrl+Shift+X (Cmd+Shift+X on macOS).
2. Search for zovo.zovo-spreadsheet-editor and click Install. Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium install from Open VSX, where it is published as zovo/zovo-spreadsheet-editor.
3. If your editor has no gallery, download the .vsix from the Open VSX page and run "Extensions: Install from VSIX...".
4. Then use it the same way as in VS Code.

What Spreadsheet Editor handles

• A 1,000,000-row CSV opens in about 2 seconds and saves in about 1.3 seconds. A 200 MB file with 5.6 million rows opens in under 3 seconds.
• Rows you did not touch keep their delimiter, quotes, encoding, byte order mark and line endings.
• Any one-character delimiter, a quote character, comment lines, and 13 encodings including UTF-16, Windows-1252 and Shift_JIS.
• Excel .xlsx: change values and rows, and styles, number formats, merged cells, formulas and the other sheets stay.
• A file changed on disk while you edit is never overwritten without asking.

What it does not do

• Pivot tables, charts, shapes, slicers and macros are not kept when an Excel file is saved. Before the first save of such a workbook, a note lists them and offers Save a Copy.
• Macro workbooks (.xlsm) are never written in place. Edits go to a new .xlsx copy.
• CSV files over 512 MB open read-only, and workbooks over 40 MB do not open for editing (both are settings).
• Sorting and filtering change the view only, not the order of rows in the file.

In JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, CLion and others)

• CSV Editor. Zovo has no JetBrains plugin for CSV editing. This one has 13,838,961 downloads. Its listing says: "Edit CSV, TSV, and PSV files as text or as a table".
• ExcelEditor. 316,361 downloads, for Excel files.

Other options

• Edit CSV (janisdd.vscode-edit-csv, 2.5 million installs, on Open VSX). Its own description: "extension to edit csv files with a table ui". The most installed CSV table editor.
• Rainbow CSV (mechatroner.rainbow-csv, 25 million installs, on Open VSX). Its own description: "Highlight CSV and TSV files, Run SQL-like queries". It colors the columns in the text editor, so you edit the text itself.
• Spreadsheet Viewer (GrapeCity.gc-excelviewer, 6.8 million installs, on Open VSX). Its own description: "Edit XLSX spreadsheets and CSV files in Visual Studio Code and VS Code for the Web."

Install counts and Open VSX status were checked on 9 November 2026. Descriptions in quotes are the extensions' own.

Questions

More about Spreadsheet Editor

Read the Spreadsheet Editor page for every feature and setting, or the source code on GitHub.

Related guides

• XLSX, Excel, CSV & Parquet Viewer on the VS Code Marketplace (also on Open VSX). Opens xlsx, xls, csv and parquet files as a sortable table with SQL filters.
• Find and replace across all CSV files in a workspace
• Open an Excel .xlsx file in VS Code
• Open an Excel file in Cursor
• See a CSV file as a table in VS Code