How to Extract Specific Columns from CSV or Delimited Text
You have a CSV export with a dozen fields and you only need two of them - maybe just the name and the email, or just an ID column to feed into something else. Opening it in a spreadsheet to delete every unwanted column by hand works, but it's slow for anything you do more than once.
Quick answer
To extract specific columns from CSV or delimited text, paste the data into a column extractor tool, set the delimiter to match your data, and enter the column numbers you want (like 1,3). Only those fields are kept, in the order you specify - everything else is dropped.
Pull out just what you need
Open Column Extractor →How it works
Input (Extract: 1,3)
Alice,30,Engineer Bob,25,Designer Carol,35,Manager
Output
Alice,Engineer Bob,Designer Carol,Manager
- Paste your delimited text into the input panel.
- Set the delimiter to match your data - comma, tab, pipe, or another separator.
- Enter the column numbers you want, separated by commas. Columns are numbered from 1, left to right.
- The output updates instantly with only the columns you asked for, in that order.
Reordering columns
The order you type the column numbers is the order they come out in - it doesn't have to match
the original layout. Extracting 3,1 from a name/age/job line puts the job title
first and the name second, even though name was originally first.
Common uses
- Pulling just the email or ID column out of a wide export to get a clean plain list.
- Dropping columns with sensitive data before sharing an export with someone else.
- Reordering fields to match a different system's expected column order before importing.
- Isolating one field for use as input into another tool - like a list of names for the Compare Two Lists tool.
Need the whole thing readable, not just some columns?
The Text Columnizer aligns every column into a table instead of removing any.