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 RDF is
RDF in Turtle syntax: subject, predicate, object triples describing each row.
Linked data and semantic web projects.
What changes when you convert Excel to RDF
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.
Each row becomes a subject with one predicate per column, under an example.org namespace you will want to change.
What carries over from Excel to RDF
Excel records 4 things about a table that RDF has no way to hold.
Excel distinguishes a number from the text of a number; RDF 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 RDF, so a null and an empty string in the Excel both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
RDF has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the Excel - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in RDF and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a RDF file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.