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 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 changes when you convert HTML to Excel
The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.
You get a single sheet with a header row and column widths sized to the content. Values are written as text unless type inference is on, which keeps identifiers like 0044 or 007 intact.
What carries over from HTML to Excel
HTML records 2 things about a table that Excel has no way to hold.
Excel wants a type for each column, and HTML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Excel has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
Excel has no separate idea of a header, so the column names become an ordinary first row and nothing in the file marks them as different from the data.