CSVPad

CsvPad is a small tool for opening, viewing, editing and saving CSV files. Not a spreadsheet, not an import wizard, no sign-in – open the file, change it, save it.

WHAT MAKES CSVPAD DIFFERENT

Spreadsheets interpret CSV files. They turn 0043 into 43, read 1.5 as a date and quietly drop leading zeros. CsvPad does none of that. Every cell is text and stays text. What you do not change yourself, CsvPad does not change either – your values, the delimiter and the encoding all survive saving.

OPENING AND SAVING

The delimiter and the character encoding are detected when a file is opened. If the detection got it wrong, correct both under "Change format" and the file is read again – no wizard standing in your way on every single file, but the correction is one click away.

Delimiters: comma, semicolon, tab, vertical bar.
Encodings: UTF-8 with and without BOM, UTF-16 LE and BE, Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1.

When saving, the delimiter and encoding of the original file are reused. New files are written as UTF-8 without BOM.

EDITING

Cells are edited directly in the table and may span several lines. Rows can be appended, inserted below, duplicated and deleted; the most recently deleted row can be put back at its original position. Columns can be appended, renamed and deleted.

Several files are open at once in tabs. They are still there the next time you start.

CAREFUL WITH YOUR DATA

If another program changes a file you have open, CsvPad tells you and offers to reload it. Nothing is overwritten silently, not even when you save.

If CsvPad had to straighten something out while loading – a row with too few or too many fields, quotation marks that did not add up – it does not keep quiet about it. The status bar reports how many rows were affected and one click shows the list. The file is still loaded in full.

Unsaved changes are marked with an asterisk in the tab and you are asked about them before closing.

USING IT

Search across all cells with Ctrl+F, jump on with F3. Open files by dragging them onto the window or through "Open with" in Explorer. Row numbers can be shown or hidden. Keyboard shortcuts and everything that might surprise you are listed in the built-in help, reachable with F1.

CsvPad runs as a single instance: a file opened from Explorer becomes a new tab in the window that is already running.

DELIBERATELY NOT INCLUDED

So you do not go looking for them: CsvPad does not sort or filter, has no formulas, no column types and no Excel formats. Cell ranges cannot be copied to Excel in one block. If you need any of that, a spreadsheet serves you better. CsvPad exists for the case where a spreadsheet is exactly what ruined your file.