Table to Markdown makes it easy to convert cells from Microsoft Excel, Google Sheet, LibreOffice Calc, or any modern spreadsheet application, into Markdown.

How it works

Need to convert from Excel to Markdown?When copying cells from Excel and other spreadsheet applications, this data is stored in your clipboard as text and as an HTML table.This is how you can copy cells from Microsoft Excel, paste them into Microsoft Word, and still see the cells as a table.

Available through command Excel to Markdown table and keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt+V. Optionally align columns by prepending the headers with ^ lcr for left, center and right alignment. E.g ^lHeader for left aligning the columns named Header. Based on and the work of @jonmagic and @thisdavej. Available through command Excel to Markdown table and keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt+V. Optionally align columns by prepending the headers with ^ lcr for left, center and right alignment. E.g ^lHeader for left aligning the columns named Header. Based on and the work of @jonmagic and @thisdavej.

Table to Markdown uses this HTML version of your spreadsheet cells, too.And with just a few steps, you can turn those cells into well-formatted Markdown:

1. Select the cells you'd like to convert to Markdown

2. Copy those cells to your clipboard

You can right-click and select 'Copy' or type Ctrl+C for Windows or Command+C for macOS.

3. Paste the cells in the Table to Markdown paste area

You can right-click and select 'Paste' or type Ctrl+V for Windows or Command+V for macOS.

4. Click the 'Convert' button

Once you click 'Convert', you'll see a happy Markdown table waiting for you:

It's as easy as that!

Alternatives

There are other ways to convert spreadsheets to Markdown, too.

TableConvert

TableConvert is an online application that can convert tables from a number of formats.It also features a WYSIWYG table editor, which is convenient for composing or editing a table.

exceltk

Excel toolkit, or exceltk, is a command-line program for Windows, macOS, and Linux that can convert an Excel file into a number of formats, including Markdown.

In the original Markdown spec, John Gruber describes Markdown as 'a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.'It was designed to be easy to read and easy to write, and it certainly meets those requirements.Compare writing a bold link in HTML:

Excel To Markdown Online Conversion

with Markdown:

The Markdown version has almost 1/3 fewer characters without losing any information.

This ability to generate HTML without writing HTML hasn't gone unnoticed.Since 2004, Markdown has continued to climb in popularity.The Google Trends data for 'markdown' shows impressive growth, especially since 2010:

Markdown tooling has also exploded since 2004, with Markdown parsers in many languages (e.g., Python-Markdown for Python; Marked, Showdown, and markdown-it for JavaScript).At the same time, developers wrote extensions to extend Markdown's original feature set, including an extension to represent HTML tables with Markdown's characteristic user-friendliness.

Markdown Tables

The syntax for describing tables in Markdown was popularized by GitHub in the The GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) Spec.The GFM spec describes tables in Markdown like this:

A table is an arrangement of data with rows and columns, consisting of a single header row, a delimiter row separating the header from the data, and zero or more data rows.

In other words--or in other Markdown--this is what a table looks like following the GFM table spec:

Excel To Markdown Online

This table is formatted to be easy on the eyes, but not all Markdown tables are.Take a look at the formatting of this table, which is equally compliant but less readable:

This readability issue gets even worse when adding rich content into table data cells:

Excel To Markdown Online Conversion

Composing and editing Markdown tables while keeping them readable is no picnic.Thank goodness there's Table to Markdown!