What is TSV?

TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.

Who uses it

Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.

Reading TSV

The tab is unambiguous, so there is no delimiter to guess. This is the most reliable of the delimited formats to read.

Writing TSV

Pick TSV over CSV when your values contain commas. Pasting the result straight into a spreadsheet fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.

What it can hold

TSV is a delimited text format. TSV separates columns with tabs and agrees on no quoting convention, so a tab or a newline inside a value has no safe representation. A machine can read the table back out of it without guessing, which is what makes it safe to convert into and out of.

It keeps

Its own record boundaries. A reader can take one row at a time without loading the file, and a copy that was cut off part way through still yields everything before the cut.

It cannot express

Types. Every value is text. A column of digits is indistinguishable from a column of numbers until something downstream decides to read it as one, which is where a leading zero usually disappears.
A null. An absent value and an empty one look the same, and nothing in the file says which was meant.
Nesting. Cells are flat, so structured values have to be flattened into extra columns or written into one cell as text.
Any formatting. Bold, colour, column widths and merged cells have nowhere to go.

What it looks like

Example TSV

id	name	role	started	hours
007	Halima Yusuf	Analyst, data	2024-03-15	38.5
012	Jonah "Jo" Pryce	Engineer	2025-11-02	
104	Wei Chen	Manager	2023-06-30	40

Questions

How do I open TSV files?

Any text editor will show you the contents. To read it as a table, paste it into the converter on this site and it appears in an editable grid. Nothing is uploaded.

Is TSV a good format for sharing data?

It depends who is receiving it. Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV. If the recipient is outside that group, a plain CSV travels further than anything else.