Open a TDMS file in Excel

Without the add-in

Drop the .tdms file above, then press Export. The result is an Excel workbook laid out as NI's add-in lays it out: a sheet of properties, then one sheet per group, one column per channel. It opens with a double click, on Windows or macOS. No add-in and no LabVIEW are needed, and the file is read in this tab without being uploaded.

A workbook made in the browser holds up to two million values. For a larger file, export each group to CSV, split under Excel's row limit.

Decimal comma or decimal point

Excel reads a CSV file with the separators of your system's language. In the export dialog, choose:

• Comma separated, decimal point for Excel in English.
• Semicolon separated, decimal comma for Excel in French, German and the other languages that write 3,14.

With the wrong choice, Excel puts a whole row in one cell or reads numbers as text.

More than a million rows

An Excel sheet holds 1,048,576 rows. A longer channel is split into numbered files of 1,048,575 rows each, plus the header, so that no value is lost when Excel opens them.

Time and text

• A time column in seconds, and an optional column of absolute time in UTC when the channel has wf_start_time.
• Text that starts with =, +, - or @ is prefixed, so that Excel shows it instead of running it as a formula.