Convert Excel to Box-Drawing Table Online

Paste an Excel table below, edit it if you need to, and get Box-Drawing Table back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

From a page

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.

Edit

Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.

ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

Header rowDetect numbers

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

What Excel is

An Excel workbook is a zip archive of XML parts describing sheets, cells, formulas, styles and charts. The .xlsx extension is that format; .xls is the older binary one from before 2007.

Finance, operations and anyone who received a file from finance or operations.

What Box-Drawing Table is

The same grid as an ASCII table, drawn with Unicode box-drawing characters instead of punctuation.

Terminal UIs and documentation where the output is known to be UTF-8.

What changes when you convert Excel to Box-Drawing Table

Only the first sheet is read, and cells are read as the text Excel displays rather than the number underneath. That matters for dates: a cell showing 15/03/2026 arrives as that string, not as a serial number you would then have to decode.

Prettier than plus signs, and safe anywhere the reader's font has the box-drawing block, which is almost everywhere in 2026.

What carries over from Excel to Box-Drawing Table

Excel records 4 things about a table that box-drawing table has no way to hold.

Excel distinguishes a number from the text of a number; box-drawing table does not, so every value arrives as text and has to be re-parsed by whatever reads it next.

An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in box-drawing table, so a null and an empty string in the Excel both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.

A line break inside a cell ends the row in box-drawing table, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.

box-drawing table marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.

Anything visual in the Excel - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in box-drawing table and is dropped. The values are what survives.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

Excel in

id,name,role,started,hours
007,Halima Yusuf,"Analyst, data",2024-03-15,38.5
012,"Jonah ""Jo"" Pryce",Engineer,2025-11-02,
104,Wei Chen,Manager,2023-06-30,40

Box-Drawing Table out

┌─────┬──────────────────┬───────────────┬────────────┬───────┐
│ id  │ name             │ role          │ started    │ hours │
├─────┼──────────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┼───────┤
│ 007 │ Halima Yusuf     │ Analyst, data │ 2024-03-15 │ 38.5  │
│ 012 │ Jonah "Jo" Pryce │ Engineer      │ 2025-11-02 │       │
│ 104 │ Wei Chen         │ Manager       │ 2023-06-30 │ 40    │
└─────┴──────────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┴───────┘

Questions

How do I convert Excel to Box-Drawing Table?

Paste your Excel into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Box-Drawing Table from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Does converting to Excel keep my formulas?

No. A table has values, not formulas. If your source came from Excel in the first place, the formulas were already resolved to their results before they reached this page. Anything that was =SUM(A1:A10) arrives as the number it produced.

Will my numbers still be numbers?

They will read the same, but box-drawing table stores them as text. Anything that sorts or sums the result will need to parse them first, and a leading zero or a currency symbol is the usual place that goes wrong.

One of my cells has a line break in it - what happens?

A line break would end the row in box-drawing table, so it is replaced instead of carried through. The rest of the cell stays where it belongs.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.