Convert Excel to Markdown Online

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

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

A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.

README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.

What changes when you convert Excel to Markdown

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.

Cells are padded so the source lines up in a plain text editor, pipes inside values are escaped, and line breaks inside a cell become <br> because a Markdown table row cannot span lines.

What carries over from Excel to Markdown

Excel records 4 things about a table that Markdown has no way to hold.

Excel distinguishes a number from the text of a number; Markdown 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 Markdown, 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 Markdown, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.

Markdown 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 Markdown 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
Markdown 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 Markdown?

Paste your Excel into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Markdown 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.

Can a Markdown table cell contain a line break?

Not directly. The row ends at the newline. Use a <br> tag inside the cell, which every common Markdown renderer passes through to the HTML output.

Will my numbers still be numbers?

They will read the same, but Markdown 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 Markdown, 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.

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