Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your BED file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert BED to another file type
To convert your BED file to another format, you need UCSC Genome Browser or other Data software.
Convert a file to BED
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Data" file type, you need software like UCSC Genome Browser or a similar tool.
About BED files
The .bed file extension primarily refers to the Browser Extensible Data format, a tab-delimited text file used in bioinformatics to define genomic regions. Developed for the UCSC Genome Browser, these files store coordinates (chromosome, start, end) and annotations for visualizing gene tracks. While widely supported, standard .bed files present significant challenges: they rely on a specific "0-based start, 1-based end" coordinate system that confuses manual analysis, and large datasets become unwieldy in standard text editors like Notepad. Furthermore, a critical conflict exists with the PLINK binary genotype format, which also uses the .bed extension but is a completely unreadable binary file requiring specific analysis tools. To overcome these compatibility hurdles and coordinate confusion, researchers often need to convert .bed files. For statistical analysis and easy viewing, converting to CSV or Excel (.XLSX) is essential. For integration with other annotation pipelines, converting to GFF or GTF is recommended. To optimize large datasets for web visualization without lagging, the best practice is converting to the binary indexed BigBed (.BB) format. If you possess a PLINK binary .bed, it must be converted to VCF or text-based PED formats for interoperability with modern variant callers.
Convert.Guru analyzes your BED file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert BED file to VCF, TABLE, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF or DAT, you can use UCSC Genome Browser or similar software from the "Genomic Interval Annotation" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to BED, try UCSC Genome Browser or another comparable tool in the "Genomic Interval Annotation" category.
The BED Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BED converter.