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 HTML is
An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.
Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.
What changes when you convert Excel to HTML
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.
Semantic markup: a real thead, a real tbody, th for the header row. Angle brackets and ampersands in your data are escaped, so a value like <script> is written safely and shows as text on the page.
What carries over from Excel to HTML
Excel records 2 things about a table that HTML has no way to hold.
Excel distinguishes a number from the text of a number; HTML 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 HTML, so a null and an empty string in the Excel both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
HTML marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.