Excel to Markdown table

How to convert Excel to a Markdown table

• Copy and paste: select cells in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or LibreOffice Calc, copy, and paste into the box. The clipboard carries tab-separated text, so columns stay intact — even cells with line breaks.
• Or open the file: drop an .xlsx, .xlsm, .xls, .ods, or .numbers workbook on the box, pick a sheet, and optionally narrow it to a range like A1:D20.
• Choose whether the first row is the header (or use column letters A, B, C), how merged cells are handled, and whether to skip hidden and empty rows.
• Copy the Markdown table or download it as .md, and check the rendered preview for how GitHub will show it.

When you open a file, each cell is read with the same number format Excel uses to display it, so 45500 with a date format comes out as 2024-07-27, not a serial number, and currency and percentages keep their symbols. Numeric columns are right-aligned in the Markdown automatically. Hyperlinks become Markdown links, and pipes inside cells are escaped so they don't break the table.

Google Sheets to Markdown, with formatting

When you copy from Google Sheets or Excel, the clipboard also holds an HTML copy of the selection. This converter reads it, so bold cells become **bold**, italics become *italic*, strikethrough becomes ~~text~~, and linked cells become [text](url). Merged cells in the selection are resolved too. A bold header row isn't wrapped in asterisks, because Markdown already renders the header bold.

Markdown to Excel: convert a Markdown table to .xlsx

Tables in READMEs, docs, and AI chat answers are Markdown, and pasting Markdown into Excel directly gives you one column full of pipes. The Markdown → Excel tab fixes that two ways:

• Download .xlsx — a real workbook. Numbers like 1,250.00, 12%, and $9.99 are stored as numbers with a matching format, so sums and sorting work; IDs with leading zeros like 0042 stay text. Columns are sized to fit, the header row gets filters, and each table in the document becomes its own sheet.
• Copy for Excel / Google Sheets — puts the table on your clipboard as tab-separated cells plus an HTML table. Click a cell and paste: this is how to paste a Markdown table into Excel without any text-to-columns step.

To create a Google Sheet from a Markdown table, copy it here, open a blank spreadsheet at sheets.new, click A1, and paste. You can also download the .xlsx and open it from Google Drive.

No converter handy? The manual route in Excel is to paste the Markdown into column A, then use Data → Text to Columns → Delimited → Other: |, and delete the dashed delimiter row and the empty first and last columns. In Google Sheets, the same thing is Data → Split text to columns with a custom separator |. It works for simple tables but breaks on escaped pipes and leaves padding spaces behind.

Excel to Markdown with Python and pandas

import pandas as pd   # pip install pandas openpyxl tabulate

df = pd.read_excel("report.xlsx", sheet_name="sales")
print(df.to_markdown(index=False))

import io
import pandas as pd

md = open("table.md").read()
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(md), sep="|", skipinitialspace=True)
df = df.dropna(axis=1, how="all").iloc[1:]      # drop edge columns + the --- row
df.columns = df.columns.str.strip()
df.to_excel("table.xlsx", index=False)

The pandas route is handy inside a pipeline, but it loses Excel's display formatting on the way out and mishandles escaped \| pipes on the way in. For a CSV file rather than a workbook, the CSV to Markdown converter has delimiter detection and a Markdown table generator, and the JSON to Markdown converter handles API responses and other JSON data.

Frequently asked questions