How it works: your clipboard already speaks TSV
When you select a range of cells in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers and copy it, the app isn't just taking a picture of what's on screen. It writes plain text to your clipboard, and that text already has structure: columns are separated by tab characters and rows are separated by line breaks. This format is called TSV, short for tab-separated values, and it's the reason pasting a copied range into another spreadsheet lands every value in the right cell — the receiving app just reads the tabs as column boundaries. This excel to markdown table tool takes advantage of that same clipboard behavior. You don't need to export or upload anything; you copy a range the normal way and paste the resulting tab-separated text into the box below, and the tool reads it exactly the way a spreadsheet would.
Converting Excel or Google Sheets to Markdown
Select the range you want, including the header row, and copy it with Ctrl+C or Cmd+C. Paste
into the input box with "Excel → Markdown" selected, which is the default direction. The tool
treats the first row as the table header, trims stray whitespace from every cell, and lays the
rest out as a standard Markdown table with a header-separator row of dashes underneath. If a
cell contains a pipe character, it gets escaped as \| so it doesn't get mistaken
for a column boundary when the Markdown is rendered. That's really all there is to it when you
want to convert excel to markdown for a GitHub README, a wiki page, or documentation written
in Markdown. The same process works whether the data came from Excel, google sheets to
markdown conversion, or Apple Numbers — any app that copies a selected range as tab-separated
text will paste in correctly here, because the tool only cares about the tabs and line breaks,
not which program produced them.
Converting a Markdown table back to a spreadsheet
Sometimes the table already exists in Markdown — in a README, a spec document, or a chat
message — and you want it back in a spreadsheet instead. Switch the direction to "Markdown →
Excel (TSV)" and paste the Markdown table text into the input box. The tool keeps only the
lines that look like table rows, drops the --- separator row that marks where the
header ends, and converts each remaining row's pipe-delimited cells into tab-separated text.
Copy that output and paste it directly into a cell in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers —
because the result is tab-separated, the spreadsheet app splits it back into columns
automatically, the same way it would with any other tab-separated paste, and your table lands
in cells rather than as one block of text.
Tips: pipes, empty cells, and alignment
A few details are worth knowing before you rely on this markdown table generator for anything complicated. If your rows have different numbers of columns — a common result of copying an uneven range — every row gets padded with empty cells out to the width of the widest row, so the Markdown table stays rectangular instead of breaking. Pasting empty input produces empty output rather than an empty table shell. The tool doesn't read .xlsx files directly, and it doesn't parse anything beyond the text you paste — nothing is uploaded, and there's no file picker, because the whole point is that your clipboard already contains everything needed. One limitation worth knowing about pipes: escaping happens when building a Markdown table from your cells, but the reverse conversion doesn't know the difference between an escaped pipe inside a cell and a real column boundary, so a cell that legitimately contains a pipe character can get split apart when converting back to TSV. For ordinary spreadsheet data — names, numbers, dates, short labels — this never comes up. It only matters if a cell's actual content includes a pipe character. Finally, this tool always produces left-aligned columns; it doesn't add colon markers that control column alignment in some Markdown renderers, since most tables paste in from spreadsheets without needing that formatting anyway.