How to export YouTube comments to Excel or Google Sheets

1. Why put comments in a spreadsheet

The comment section is built for conversation, not for review. It shows comments a few at a time, and there is no way to sort them by likes or search across them in one view. A spreadsheet gives you all of that.

Creators export comments to collect video ideas and questions from their audience, to report engagement to a sponsor, to keep a record of giveaway entries, or simply to read everything in one place before planning the next upload.

2. What YouTube offers on its own

YouTube Studio is good for reading and replying to comments, and it lets you filter them. It does not have a button to download them.

Google Takeout is often suggested, but it covers comments you have written yourself, not the comments other people leave on your videos. To export a video’s comments, you need a tool that reads them through the YouTube Data API.

3. Export the comments to a CSV file

CSV is a plain text format that every spreadsheet application can open. With the free ChatCheckly comment export, it takes three steps:

• Paste the video link

  Copy the video’s address from your browser or the Share button and paste it into the comment export tool. The video ID on its own works too.

• Choose CSV

  CSV is the right format for Excel and Google Sheets. JSON is there if you plan to work with the data in code.

• Download the file

  Each row is one comment, with the author’s name, the comment text, the date it was posted, and its like count.

A few things to know. The export includes top-level comments, not replies. Comments arrive in YouTube’s relevance order, so the comments YouTube ranks highest come first. Without an account you can export up to 100 comments per video; a free account raises that to 1,000 and lets you add each author’s channel link and the comment ID.

4. Open the file in Google Sheets

Create a new spreadsheet, then choose File → Import → Upload and select the downloaded file. Pick “Replace spreadsheet” or “Insert new sheet” and leave the separator on automatic. Google Sheets reads the file as UTF-8, so emoji and accented names come through as they should.

5. Open the file in Excel

Double-clicking the file usually works, but some versions of Excel guess the wrong text encoding. When that happens, emoji and non-English characters turn into strings like “é”.

To avoid it, open a blank workbook and use Data → From Text/CSV. Set File origin to “65001: Unicode (UTF-8)”, check the preview, and click Load. Excel then keeps every character intact and places each field in its own column.

6. Find what matters

With the comments in rows, a few simple moves go a long way:

• Sort by likes

  Sorting the like count from high to low shows which comments your audience agreed with most. They often point to the moment or idea that landed.

• Filter for questions

  Filter the comment text for “?” to gather your audience’s questions in one list. Repeated questions make good topics for your next video or a pinned reply.

• Count a topic

  Count how often a word appears with a formula such as =COUNTIF(B:B, "*tutorial*") to see whether a request is a one-off or a pattern.

• Group by day

  Dates come in ISO format, such as 2026-10-04T15:30:00Z. A formula like =DATEVALUE(LEFT(C2, 10)) turns them into dates you can chart, so you can see how conversation builds after an upload.

When reading starts to take longer than the video did, that is the point to let software do the first pass. ChatCheckly can analyze the same comments for sentiment and recurring topics: a free account includes a basic sentiment score, and paid plans analyze thousands of comments a month, so you can start from the patterns instead of the raw list.