When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Tab Delimited Mean?
Tab delimited is a text format which is widely accepted for creation and viewing by most spreadsheet programs and editor applications. A tab delimited text file is unique because an entry in the file cannot take more than a single line — the first line is called a header line, and it contains the labels for each field; various fields are separated by tabs and each entry must have the same number of fields.
Tab delimited is also known as tab-separated values (TSV).
Techopedia Explains Tab Delimited
The tab delimited format stores information from a database or spreadsheet in the format of a tabular structure. Each record takes one line of storage in the text file. Both Microsoft and Google allow the user to convert a spreadsheet into tab delimited format. It is important to understand that tabs are invisible and nothing but a long space character. This file format is used to move tabular data between different computer programs that support different formats. For example, a TSV file might be used to transfer information from a database program to a spreadsheet.
