Excel only saved one sheet when I exported to CSV — where are my other tabs?
Saved a multi-tab workbook as CSV and only one sheet came out? CSV can only ever hold a single flat table, so Excel exports just the sheet you had open, with no warning. Here's where your other tabs actually went
Your other tabs aren't lost — they're still in the .xlsx
Saving as CSV never touches the source workbook. Open the original .xlsx file again and every tab you had before is exactly where you left it — the export process reads from the workbook, it doesn't modify or remove anything from it. What you're missing is only in the new CSV file, not in your data.
Why CSV can only ever have one sheet
A CSV file is nothing more than rows of comma-separated text — there is no header section, no metadata, no way to mark "this block of rows is Sheet2." The format simply has no vocabulary for a workbook with multiple tabs, so any tool writing a CSV from a multi-sheet source has to pick exactly one sheet to represent, and Excel's built-in exporter picks whichever sheet is currently active.
Getting every sheet out as its own file
Click each tab in turn, use Save As, choose CSV, and give each one a distinct filename before saving the next — Excel will happily let you overwrite the same filename repeatedly if you're not paying attention, which is the other common way people end up thinking a sheet "disappeared." If you need this done routinely rather than as a one-off, a tool or macro that loops through every sheet and exports each as its own CSV saves you the repetitive manual steps.