Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers to a Markdown table

Copy the cells, paste them here, and copy the table back out. CSV works too. It all happens in your browser, so nothing you paste leaves this page.

Coffee, the Markdown editor this site is for, does this by itself: paste cells into a note on the Mac and they arrive as a table. How pasting tables works.

How it works

Spreadsheets copy cells as text with a tab between columns. This reads that, or CSV, and writes a GitHub Flavored Markdown table: a header row, a row of dashes, then your rows. Pipes in a cell are escaped, so they don't split it.

Alignment adds colons to the dashes: :--- for left, :---: for centre, ---: for right. "Numbers to the right" does that only for columns of figures. For more on writing tables by hand, see the Markdown tables guide.

Questions

Does this work with Google Sheets and Numbers?

Yes. Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers all copy cells as text with tabs between the columns, and that's what this reads. CSV with commas or semicolons works too.

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. The conversion runs in this page, in your browser. What you paste isn't sent to a server or stored.

What can't a Markdown table hold?

Merged cells, formulas, colours and column widths. You get the values as they were copied. A line break inside a cell becomes <br>, which GitHub shows as a new line.

Also free: Google Docs, Word or Notion to Markdown.