Split an Excel workbook by sheet

What it is for

A workbook with twelve tabs — one per month, one per branch, one per client — is convenient for whoever maintains it and awkward for whoever has to hand it out. If each recipient should only see their own sheet, you cannot send them the whole workbook.

Doing it by hand means opening the file, right-clicking each tab, "Move or Copy → New book", saving under a name, and repeating. Twelve times. And one lapse of attention is all it takes to send one client another client's sheet.

Here you upload the workbook and download the ZIP. Each file is named after the original plus the sheet name, so you can tell at a glance which is which.

What comes out

One file per sheet, in the order the sheets appear in the workbook. You choose the output format:

• .xlsx when the recipient will keep working with the sheet.
• .csv when the file feeds another system. A CSV holds a single table, so splitting is exactly what is needed before importing.

Sheet names are sanitised into valid file names: slashes and forbidden characters are removed, and if two sheets would end up with the same name the second one is numbered.

The limits that prevent a mess

If the workbook has only one sheet, the tool stops and tells you. There is nothing to split, and handing back a ZIP with a single file inside would be worse than doing nothing.

The cap is 200 files. It is a practical limit: a ZIP with thousands of sheets inside is no use to anyone.

The opposite operation

If you want the reverse — many files and one workbook — there is Merge into sheets, which puts each file on its own tab, and Merge stacking rows, which joins everything into a single table. To flatten the tabs of a workbook you already have, use Combine sheets.