Requirements

macOS	macOS 14 Sonoma or later
Distribution	Mac App Store only
App language	English. The App Store page is in English and French.
Account	None
Network	None. The app has no permission to connect to the internet.

Files

Opens	CSV, TSV and delimited text (comma, semicolon, tab, pipe). Microsoft Excel workbooks (.xlsx), one sheet at a time, with Tabulay Pro.
Encodings	UTF-8, with or without a byte order mark, and Windows-1252. UTF-16 files with a byte order mark are refused with a clear message.
Detected on open	Delimiter, encoding, header row, decimal separator and date format, with a live preview (File ▸ Open with Options, ⇧⌘O).
Decimals	A decimal point (`-1234.50`) or a decimal comma (`-1.234,50`, `-12 480,00`, thousands grouped by a dot or a space), detected per column. Decimal-comma amounts are numbers everywhere: totals, number filters, sorting, the inspector and SQL. Saving keeps every amount as written.
Size	Up to 2 GB for editing. Larger files open read-only. Every file is memory-mapped and indexed in one pass; rows are parsed only when shown or queried.
Line endings	CRLF, LF, lone CR and mixed, each kept as it was on save.
Also handled	Quoted fields with delimiters and line breaks inside, escaped quotes, blank lines, rows with too few or too many fields, a missing final newline.
Saves	In the file’s own format. Untouched rows are copied byte for byte; edited rows are written with the file’s delimiter, encoding and line endings, quoted only where needed. Adding, deleting, splitting, merging or computing a column rewrites every row that way. A value that can’t be encoded stops the save and names the value and its column.
Exports	Export View as CSV (⇧⌘E): the rows in the current view, after filters or a query. Compare differences as CSV.
Workbooks	Never written to. Open with Options picks the sheet and whether its first row is the header; Open takes the first visible sheet. Values come out plainly: numbers without grouping or currency symbols, dates as ISO, from both the 1900 and 1904 systems. Save writes a CSV.
Not supported	.xls (Excel 97 to 2003), Numbers documents, JSON, Parquet. Export them as CSV or .xlsx first.

Performance

On a 207 MB CSV file of 1.3 million rows	Time¹
Index the file, ready to scroll	0.35 s
Show the first rows	0.2 ms
Check the type of every value	1.5 s
Save after an edit	0.5 s

1. Measured on a 207 MB, 1.3-million-row CSV file with a release build of Tabulay’s core engine, September 2026. Actual times vary with the file and the Mac.

Features

Area	Free, forever	Tabulay Pro and the 14-day trial
Open	Files up to 2 GB, indexed; Open with Options	Excel workbooks (.xlsx)
Types	Every column typed; values that don’t fit are counted in the header, never converted	Normalize the few values written the other way in a number column (a stray decimal comma, or a point in a decimal-comma column) and dd/MM/yyyy dates in a date column, with a preview
Find and filter	Filter chips, Show Only and Hide from a cell, header sort, Find (⌘F), Matching Rows Only (⇧⌘F)	SQL editor, Examples, saved queries, Explain
Edit	Cells, rows and columns; paste from Numbers or Excel; Fill Down	Find & replace with regular expressions, split, merge, derived columns
Clean	Mask Card Numbers	Remove Duplicates, with the groups shown first
Compare		Compare with another file, on an ID column or by position; export the differences
History	Every change a named step; undo, redo, jump back; the History as a pipeline
Totals	Sum, average and count of a selected number column, decimal commas included, in exact decimals, over up to 200,000 rows (labelled when capped); a warning when currencies are mixed	SQL totals the whole file
Inspect	Column profile over the rows in view (the first 100,000 at most): type, conformity, figures, histogram or top values, issues	Column insights over the same rows, computed on the Mac: a box plot from P5 to P95 with P25, median, P75, mean, standard deviation and outliers; average or sum per category and per day, month or year; rows per value and top values over time; a date column’s timeline, stacked by a category, and rows per weekday. Click a category’s bar to filter

SQL

A full analytical SQL engine, built in: joins, GROUP BY with ROLLUP, window functions, QUALIFY, CTEs, PIVOT, subqueries, percentiles and medians, date and text functions, list functions and lambdas.
Your file is a table named after the file (shop_orders), or simply this. Columns are typed from the file’s schema, so amount < -1000 compares numbers, decimal-comma amounts included. A _raw view keeps the original text.
~ and !~ match regular expressions, case-insensitively.
Queries that return the file’s own rows keep the grid editable. Aggregates show as a read-only result.
Explain (⌥⌘E) shows the real query plan, with timings on request.
Once a file is loaded, the engine can’t read or write any other file, load extensions or change its own settings, and each query runs as a single statement.

Privacy and security

App Sandbox, user-selected files only. Hardened Runtime. Distributed through the Mac App Store.
No network entitlement: macOS blocks any connection. App Store privacy label, from launch: Data Not Collected.
Card numbers detected (13 to 19 digits, Luhn checksum, network prefixes) and masked in the grid. Grid copies that hold them are kept off clipboard history. Columns of card numbers are flagged before a save or export writes them in full.
Working copies for files over 64 MB live in the app’s container and are deleted on close, or at the next launch after a crash. They can be kept in memory only.
Security settings can be enforced by MDM for the preference domain me.expertiseby.tabulay. See Security and compliance.

Accessibility and the Mac

Dark Mode and Increase Contrast, with colors defined for each. The Find highlight and the brief notices don’t have high-contrast versions yet.
VoiceOver. Every command is in a menu and in the command palette (⌘K), and the common ones have shortcuts.
Native tabs, Duplicate, Rename, Move To and Revert to Saved, from the Mac’s own document system.
Can become the default app for .csv, .tsv and .xlsx files.

Keyboard shortcuts

Also in the app under Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts (⌘/).

Shortcut	Command	Menu
`⌘K`	Command Palette	View
`⌘O` `⇧⌘O`	Open, Open with Options	File
`⌘S` `⇧⌘S` `⌥⇧⌘S`	Save, Duplicate, Save As	File
`⇧⌘E`	Export View as CSV	File
`⌘Z` `⇧⌘Z`	Undo, Redo (named after the step)	Edit
`⌘C` `⌘V` `⌘X`	Copy, Paste, Cut, as tab-separated text	Edit
`⌘F` `⌘G` `⇧⌘G`	Find, Find Next, Find Previous	Edit ▸ Find
`⇧⌘F`	Matching Rows Only	Edit ▸ Find
`⌥⌘F`	Find & Replace	Edit ▸ Find
`⌘D`	Fill Down	Table
`⌥↑` `⌥↓`	Insert Row Above, Below	Table
`⌥←` `⌥→`	Insert Column Before, After	Table
`⌘⌫`	Delete Rows	Table
`⌘1` `⌘2`	Filter Chips, SQL Editor	View
`⌃⌘S` `⌥⌘I`	Toggle Sidebar, Toggle Inspector	View
`⌥⌘Y`	Show History	View
`⌘↩` `⌥⌘E`	Run Query, Explain Query	Data
`⇧⌘D`	Remove Duplicates	Data
`⌥⌘C`	Compare With	Data
`↩` or type	Edit a cell; ↩ commits and moves down, ⇥ moves right, esc cancels	Grid
`⌘↑` `⌘↓`	First row, last row (add ⇧ to extend the selection)	Grid
`⇧Space` `⌃Space`	Select the row, select the column	Grid
`:N` in ⌘K	Go to row N	Palette

Tech specs