How to export TikTok comments to Excel

A TikTok comment section is a good source of opinion and a terrible place to read it. You get one screen at a time, ordered however TikTok chooses, with no way to filter, count or search. In Excel the same comments become something you can sort, chart and hand to a client. Here is how to get them there, and what to do once they arrive.

Step by step

1. Copy the video link from TikTok's share menu. Short links that start with vm. or vt. work too.
2. Paste it into the comment exporter and choose how many comments to pull, up to 10,000. Tick "Include reply threads" if you want the conversations under the busiest comments as well.
3. When the job finishes, download Excel (.xlsx).

Choose the Excel download over CSV if Excel is where the file is going. Comment ids are 19 digits long, and Excel reads a long number from a CSV as a number, keeps 15 digits and rounds the rest, which breaks any lookup by id. The workbook stores ids as text and counts as numbers, and freezes the header row so it stays in view as you scroll.

What is in the workbook

One row per comment. The columns are the comment id, the parent comment id (empty unless the row is a reply), the text, the commenter's handle and display name, who a reply is addressed to, likes, reply count, and the time it was posted in UTC. Each column is documented, with its type and an example, on the tool page.

Five things to do once it is open

1. Turn it into a table. Select any cell and press Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on a Mac). You get filter buttons on every column and formulas that fill down by themselves.
2. Separate comments from replies. Filter parent_comment_id to blanks for top-level comments only. Sort by it instead to keep each reply next to its parent.
3. Find what people agreed with. Sort by likes, largest first. Likes on a comment are the audience voting, and the top twenty are usually a fair summary of the room.
4. Find the arguments. Sort by reply_count. A comment with few likes and many replies is usually one people disagreed with, which is often more useful than the popular ones.
5. Chart activity over time. Add a column with =DATEVALUE(LEFT([@created_at],10)) to turn the timestamp into a date, then build a pivot table counting comments per day. A late spike usually means the video was picked up again, or that a stitch or duet sent new people to it.

Searching the text

Filter the text column with "Contains" to pull the comments that mention a product, a competitor or a word like "price". For a quick tally across several terms, a column of =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("price",[@text])) per term turns each mention into TRUE or FALSE you can count. When counting stops being enough and you want to know how people feel, the method in TikTok comment sentiment analysis, done properly picks up from this sheet.

Limits worth knowing

Comment export starts on Pro, which includes 30 exports a month. Each export pulls up to 10,000 top-level comments, plus replies for up to 200 threads when you ask for them. Comments TikTok has hidden or removed are not included. The file arrives in the order TikTok returned the comments, so sort it yourself before reading anything into the order.