CSV Preview Before Import: how it works
How it works
- Open the CSV in the workbench before sending it to your target application. Inspect the detected delimiter, encoding and line endings in the file passport.
- Look across the columns and sample rows in the table. Jump to a specific row or filter a column to check values that a destination importer may interpret unexpectedly.
- Check the import diagnostics for rows with too many or too few fields. Resolve discrepancies in the workbench only if you intend to save a changed file.
What stays exactly the same
Preview does not send data to another application or rewrite the original CSV. Leading zeros and long numbers are displayed as text.
Without an explicit edit or repair, Preserve output keeps the input bytes exactly. The workbench does not guess your target system's column types or schema.
Limits
Files are uploaded to the cellsmith.app server and held in memory, not kept only in your browser. The web version accepts UTF-8 text files up to 32 MiB each. Files expire 30 minutes after the last activity; opening another file or restarting the server also clears the current document and unsaved work.
Questions about this tool
Does preview import my data into another app?
No. It opens the file in this workbench so you can inspect it before importing elsewhere.
What if rows have different numbers of cells?
The import diagnostics separate extra cells from missing cells rather than calling a malformed row clean.
Can this predict my target app's data types?
No. This is a text preview. Check the destination system's import rules for type conversion.