Paste a row or column copied from Excel or Sheets and get back a clean JSON array. Runs entirely in your browser, no export step needed.
Tab to JSON array
Copy a row or column of cells out of Excel, Sheets or Numbers, paste it in, and this app splits on the tab characters the spreadsheet placed between each cell, trims every value, and hands back a clean JSON array. The value text itself is never touched, only the tab boundaries between values.
It's local. The split runs in your browser, not on a server, so nothing you paste is uploaded and there's no cap on how many rows you convert.
Where the format comes from
Select a range of cells and copy them, and the spreadsheet puts a plain-text version on your clipboard alongside the rich formatting. That plain-text version separates cells with an actual tab character, not a comma, which is what a TSV file really is.
That matters because a comma sitting inside a cell, a price, a note, a name written last-first, stays exactly as typed when the boundary is a tab instead. A comma split would shred that cell in two; a tab split won't, since a spreadsheet reserves the tab for the boundary and doesn't put one inside a cell's own text.
Workflow
Nothing to configure, no file export step first.
Why it matters
Tabs are invisible, which is exactly why they work as a delimiter and exactly why they vanish without anyone noticing. Paste into a text editor that converts tabs to spaces on paste, or a chat app that strips them, and the boundaries this app needs are gone before it ever sees the text.
When that happens, a whole row comes back as one item instead of several, because there's nothing left to split on. If the result looks like one long string, check whatever you copied through for a setting that silently swaps tabs for spaces.
The mechanics
A spreadsheet cell is a free-text field, nothing stops someone typing a comma into it, so a comma can't safely mean 'end of cell' when the data comes back out. A tab, on the other hand, isn't something anyone types into a cell in ordinary use, and Excel and Sheets reserve it as the boundary marker precisely because it almost never collides with real content.
That's the whole reason a TSV paste is safer to split than a comma-joined string built by hand: the delimiter was chosen specifically to avoid colliding with the data.
Straight answer
Not exactly. Two tabs in a row, meaning an empty cell between two filled ones, produce an empty string after the split, and this app drops empty items rather than keeping them as blank entries. The resulting array can end up shorter than your original row had columns.
For pulling out actual values, that's usually what you want. If you need to preserve column position through blank cells, this isn't the right tool for that.
Who it's for
Developers use it to turn a single spreadsheet column into a JSON array of test data or seed values without exporting a file and writing a parser. Analysts use it to pull one row of figures out of a report straight into a JSON payload for a script.
No-code builders use it when an automation step expects an array but the source lives in a spreadsheet cell range. It also comes up when someone copies a row out of Excel into a ticket and a developer now needs that same data as JSON.
Copy the cells, paste into the box above, and press Convert. Each cell becomes one array item.
Yes, no signup, no paste limit, no run limit. It runs entirely in your browser.
No, the split runs on your own device. Nothing is transmitted or stored.
Something in the path likely turned the tab characters into spaces, so there was nothing to split on. Check for a paste setting that converts tabs to spaces.
Yes, whatever a spreadsheet's tab-separated clipboard format produces, whether from a horizontal row or vertical column selection.
No, only tab characters are boundaries, so a comma inside a cell's value stays exactly where it was.
The empty value it produces gets dropped rather than kept as a blank item, so the result may have fewer items than your row had columns.
Yes, no length cap and no run limit, only your device's own memory.
Yes, the layout stacks on narrow screens.
This splits on tab characters, what a spreadsheet copy actually contains. The comma tool splits on commas, for plain comma-separated lists instead.
Yes, every major spreadsheet app puts tab-separated plain text on the clipboard alongside its formatting.
Yes, it converts the same way as a live spreadsheet copy.
Leading and trailing spaces around each cell's value are trimmed. Spaces in the middle of the text are left alone.
The whole paste is treated as one delimited sequence and split into one array, so several rows produce one long array rather than one per row.
Not yet, paste, convert, copy for now.
Yes, since splitting only happens at tab boundaries, a value like '2,499.00' inside one cell stays as a single item.
Some browsers intercept the Tab key for navigation, which can interfere in certain input fields. Pasting rather than typing avoids that.
Not with this tool, it converts one direction only, tab-separated text to a JSON array.
Yes, items appear in the same left-to-right order as the original selection.
Yes, nothing is transmitted anywhere. It runs locally and closing the tab clears it.