Many a times you will need to combine multiple csv files in to one. Combining is required when you receive multiple files (for ex- different file for each date), but you need to process them in Excel or any other tool as a single file.
There are 3 methods to do merge csv files
- Manual – off course, was it even necessary to mention :). Though this option is not available if no. of rows in your csv files exceed maximum no. of rows in excel.
- Use software available in market (For example – Delimitware). This is a nice piece of software and lets you do a lot of things with large csv files.
- Use windows command prompt. This method is discussed in detailed in the rest of the article.
Use Windows Command prompt to merge CSV files
This is a neat trick and comes very handy for merging large CSV files. Let’s get down to the process then:
- Keep all the files you want to merge in a different folder.
- Open command prompt.
- Change directory to the folder containing your files.
(Command: cd ‘directory path’) - Now copy using COPY command.
(Command: copy *.csv combined.csv)- This command is using wild card (*) to find all files in a particular format (CSV). You can also use .txt to find and combine text files.
- combined.csv is the name of combined file and it will be available in the same folder where you kept your original csv files.
- What if you want to copy files with a common name appearing in your file names? You can again use wildcard to find files with the common name and copy.
(Command: copy *common name*.csv combined.csv)- This will find all the files with the ‘common name’ and copy those specific files to combined.csv