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Excel to Markdown: Create Markdown Tables from Spreadsheets

FreeToolConvert Editorial Team Published 2 min read
In this article
  1. How to convert Excel to Markdown
  2. An example
  3. Details that are handled for you
  4. Where to use the output
  5. Tips
  6. Privacy and limits

Markdown tables are the standard way to show data in README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, wikis and note apps like Obsidian and Notion. Typing them by hand is slow and error-prone — one missing pipe and the whole table breaks. The free Excel to Markdown converter turns a spreadsheet or CSV into a correctly formatted Markdown table in one step.

How to convert Excel to Markdown

  1. Open the Excel to Markdown converter.
  2. Choose an XLSX, XLS or CSV file. The first row is used as the table header.
  3. Convert and download the .md file, then paste its contents wherever you need the table.

An example

A sheet with three columns becomes:

| Plan     | Credits | Price |
| -------- | ------- | ----- |
| Starter  | 50      | ₹49   |
| Pro      | 200     | ₹149  |
| Business | 600     | ₹349  |

Rendered on GitHub or in a docs site, it shows as a normal table:

PlanCreditsPrice
Starter50₹49
Pro200₹149
Business600₹349

Details that are handled for you

  • Aligned columns. Cells are padded so the raw Markdown lines up and is readable in a plain text editor or a code review, not only when rendered.
  • Pipes in your data. A cell containing | would normally end the cell early. It is escaped as \|, so the table stays intact.
  • Line breaks in cells. Markdown table rows must be on a single line, so line breaks inside a cell become <br>, which GitHub and most renderers display as a new line.
  • Hindi and other scripts. Unicode text is kept exactly. Columns containing Hindi aren’t padded, because their on-screen width can’t be predicted from the number of characters — the table still renders correctly.

Where to use the output

  • GitHub and GitLab — README files, issues, pull request descriptions and wikis.
  • Documentation sites built with MkDocs, Docusaurus, Hugo, Jekyll or similar.
  • Note apps such as Obsidian, Notion (paste as Markdown), Joplin and Bear.
  • Chat tools that render Markdown tables.

Tips

  • Keep tables small. Markdown tables work best with up to about eight columns. For wider data, link to a spreadsheet or a CSV file instead.
  • Format numbers in Excel first. The converter uses the values as they are stored, so set decimal places and currency symbols in your sheet if you want them in the table.
  • Column alignment. To right-align a column of numbers, change its separator from ----- to ----: after converting.

Privacy and limits

This converter runs on our server. Your file is uploaded over HTTPS and deleted automatically within an hour. Server tools include a free daily allowance; after that each conversion uses 1 credit.

Related: Excel to HTML for web pages, and CSV to JSON for apps and APIs.

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