CSV Find and Replace

A spreadsheet’s Find and Replace changes everything it finds, everywhere. In data files that is risky: replacing “NA” with nothing also damages “Canada” and “NATO”, and changing a date format in one column must not touch prices in another. This tool replaces text only in the columns you choose, shows every changed cell before you save, and supports regular expressions for real reformatting work.

Choosing the columns

All columns are selected when a file opens. Click column chips to narrow the replacement to, say, the Status column or the Email column. The rest of the file is copied untouched. This alone prevents most accidental changes.

Plain text replacements

Type what to find and what to put instead. Leave Replace empty to delete the found text. Matching ignores case unless you switch on “Match case”, which matters when “US” and “us” mean different things. In plain mode, every character is literal, including dollar signs and dots, so “$5.00” is found exactly as typed.

Whole-cell matching

Placeholder values are a classic clean-up job: N/A, -, null, “unknown”, 0000-00-00. Switch on “Whole cell only” so only cells consisting entirely of that value change. Combined with an empty Replace field, this turns placeholders into true empty cells, which spreadsheets and databases treat correctly as missing.

Regular expressions

Switch on “Regular expression” for patterns. Groups in parentheses can be reused in the replacement: find (\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2}) and replace with $3/$2/$1 to turn 2026-10-24 into 24/10/2026. Named groups work too, written (?<year>\d{4}) and reused as $<year>. If a pattern is not valid, the tool shows the error instead of guessing. The Regex Tester helps develop more complex patterns.

Useful patterns

Remove everything after a hyphen: find \s*-.*$ and replace with nothing. Normalize repeated spaces: find \s+ and replace with a single space. Keep only digits in a phone column: find \D and replace with nothing. Change an email domain: find @old-domain\.com$ and replace with @new-domain.com.

Checking the result

Above the preview, the tool counts replacements, changed cells and affected rows. Changed cells are highlighted, and “Show only changed rows” hides everything else, so you can review each change quickly before downloading.

Privacy

Customer lists and order exports are edited in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Saving

Download the result as CSV, Excel or TSV. Unchanged columns keep their exact values, including leading zeros and long IDs.

Several replacements in a row

The tool performs one find-and-replace at a time. For a series of clean-ups, download the result, load it again and run the next replacement, or combine simple cases into one regular expression with alternatives, such as ^(N/A|n\.a\.|-)$ with “Whole cell only” switched off and Replace empty.

Case of the replacement

The replacement text is inserted exactly as typed. If you search without “Match case” for “usa” and replace with “United States”, every variant, whether USA, Usa or usa, becomes “United States”. That is usually what you want when tidying categories.

Related tools

For free text rather than tables, Find and Replace works on any text. To standardize phone numbers properly, use Clean Phone Numbers. To rename or remove whole columns, see Edit CSV Columns.