The spreadsheet clipboard workflow: why copying cells gives you TSV

When you select a range in Excel or Google Sheets and copy it, what lands on the clipboard is tab-separated, not comma-separated. That is the single most common way people end up holding TSV without having chosen it — you wanted "the data", and the clipboard handed you a format. Converting that paste into valid CSV is what this tool is for.

Going TSV to CSV adds quoting rather than removing it

This is the opposite of the reverse conversion. A cell containing a comma — an address, a price written 1,250, an ordinary sentence — was perfectly safe in TSV, where the only special character is the tab. In CSV that comma would split the cell in two, so the converter wraps the field in double quotes. Portland, Maine becomes "Portland, Maine".

The same rule catches two more cases. A cell containing a newline is quoted so the multi-line content stays one field. And a cell containing a double quote is quoted and has that inner quote doubled, which is the CSV standard's escape mechanism: a field reading Pipe 5" is written "Pipe 5""". That run of three closing quotes looks alarming and is correct — the outer pair delimits the field, and the doubled pair inside represents one literal quote character.

Worked example: all three cases at once

Input (TSV, tabs shown as gaps):
Product   Price   Note
Widget    1,250   Good
Pipe 5"   99.99   ok

Output (CSV):
Product,Price,Note
Widget,"1,250",Good
"Pipe 5""",99.99,ok

Only the two cells that needed protection were touched. Widget, Good, 99.99 and ok pass through untouched, because quoting every field would be valid CSV but needlessly noisy.

Ragged rows and empty lines

The converter does not pad short rows. If your source has rows with differing column counts, that unevenness is preserved exactly, because silently inventing empty cells would be a guess about data you did not supply. Fully empty rows are dropped, and carriage returns are stripped so Windows-style line endings normalise cleanly. This padding behaviour differs from the CSV to Markdown Table Converter, which must pad, since a Markdown table has to be rectangular to render at all.