Turning JSON into a table means deciding what to do with nesting, arrays and records that do not all have the same fields. This converter makes those decisions explicitly and tells you what it did, instead of quietly dropping the awkward parts.
Reading JSON
Auto-detect reads the first rows and picks the separator that splits them consistently.
Turn off when the file starts straight into data. Columns are then named column_1, column_2, and so on.
Turns "42" into a number and "true" into a boolean. Values with leading zeros stay text so IDs and zip codes survive.
Which worksheet to convert. Filled in once the workbook is read.
Dotted path to the array of records, such as data.items. Leave empty to use the whole document.
Turns {"user":{"id":7}} into a user.id column. Arrays are kept as JSON text.
Pick the encoding the file was written in. Wrong encoding shows up as garbled accents.
Comma-separated words that should become null instead of text.
Writing CSV
Snappy is the default across Spark, DuckDB and pandas. Gzip is smaller but slower to read.
Turns a user.id column back into {"user":{"id":7}}.
Excel needs a byte order mark to open UTF-8 files with accents correctly.
Rows per row group. Larger groups compress better; smaller groups let readers skip more.
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Work with Parquet as well?See ParquetReader with ParquetReader — opens Parquet files directly.Nested, self-describing records that every language can read. Plain text rows that open anywhere, with no types and no schema.
| JSON | CSV | |
|---|---|---|
| Type information | Strings, numbers, booleans, null | None — every value is text |
| Structure | Nested objects and arrays | Flat rows and columns |
| Compression | None | None |
| Typical file size | Largest — keys repeat on every record | Baseline (100%) |
| Schema | Implicit, per record | Header row at best |
| Human-readable | Yes, though verbose | Yes, in any text editor |
| Tool support | Every language, natively | Universal |
A tags array is written as ["a","b"] inside one field. Splitting arrays into extra rows would multiply your row count; splitting them into extra columns would make the header depend on the longest array in the file.
The header is the union of all keys. A field present in ten records out of a thousand becomes a column that is empty in the other 990.
Without a byte order mark, Excel guesses the encoding and turns accented characters and Cyrillic into noise. Turn on "Add BOM for Excel" if the file is destined for a spreadsheet.
Analysts and stakeholders work in Excel and Google Sheets. CSV is the handoff format.
CRMs, ad platforms and mailing tools almost universally expect delimited text.
A sorted CSV diffs cleanly line by line. Pretty-printed JSON does not.
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