PST to Excel — an Outlook mailbox as a spreadsheet
Open a .pst file in your browser and save the messages as an Excel workbook: date, sender, subject, size and attachments.
About this conversion
People ask for Excel, not for csv — the point is a sheet you can sort, filter and hand to someone else. A mailbox becomes exactly that: one row per message, with the attachment names in their own column.
What the sheet looks like
One row per message. Besides the columns shown, to, cc, a preview and the full text have columns of their own:
date from subject size attachments attachment_names labels 2021-05-03 09:12:00 Anna Rees <anna.rees@ex…> Invoice 1042 48213 1 invoice-1042.pdf Inbox 2021-05-03 11:05:41 Accounts <accounts@ex…> Re: Invoice 1042 9120 0 Sent Items 2021-05-07 16:40:12 Tom Price <tom.price@ex…> Holiday rota 15002 2 rota.xlsx | … Team
Sizing up a mailbox in Excel
Turn on Data → Filter and every column header becomes a drop-down: one sender, one folder in labels, or attachments greater than 0. A PivotTable on from and date shows who wrote how much and when — the quick way to understand a mailbox you have inherited.
Very long messages
An Excel cell holds at most 32,767 characters. A message longer than that — usually a newsletter — is cut at that point in the text column and ends with “…”. The CSV export keeps every message in full.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open a .pst file and read it.
You are not locked into XLSX
The file is parsed once and stays open, so the format is picked at the end rather than the beginning: the same .pst can leave here as CSV, ZIP, EML, MBOX, PDF, HTML, TXT or JSON. Before that you can search it by subject or address, filter by year, sender and attachment type, mark the duplicates and look through the archive overview.
Questions
- Is this a real Excel file?
- The file is a real .xlsx workbook, not a csv with another name: it opens in Excel, Numbers, LibreOffice and Google Sheets with the columns already in place.
- Do I need Outlook?
- No. The .pst is read here, in the page, on any operating system.
- Can I export only part of the mailbox?
- Yes. Filter or search first, or tick the messages you want — the sheet contains exactly those.