How to convert an Excel table to Markdown

1. Select the cells in Excel, header row included, and copy them.
2. Open rows.page, click Paste data and paste. Excel copies cells as tab-separated text, so they open as a table.
3. Open the Export menu and choose Markdown. rows.page downloads the table as a Markdown file, ready to paste into a README.md, an issue or your docs.

rows.page can't read a workbook: a dropped .xlsx or .xls file won't open as a sheet, and pushing one returns "This looks like an Excel or zip file. Export it as CSV and push again." To work from a file, save the sheet as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) and drop it on the page. Everything runs in your browser with DuckDB-WASM, and nothing is uploaded unless you press Share.

• A header row and a plain | --- | delimiter row, with no column alignment set.
• The first 1,000 rows of the current view, without hidden columns. The Export menu marks Markdown "first 1,000", but the file itself doesn't say when rows were cut.
• Pipes inside cells become \| and backslashes become \\, so the columns stay in place.
• Line breaks inside a cell become a single space, because a Markdown row has to stay on one line.
• Empty cells stay empty, and list columns are written as JSON text.

| item | note | price |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pipe \| tube | line one line two | 25 |
| Bracket |  | 10 |

The export follows your current view, so cut the table down first:

• Hide columns from the column header menu or the Columns panel.
• Filter rows with country:NL, price:>20, name:* (has a value) or -name:* (empty), or click a histogram bar or a top value in the Columns panel.
• Click a column name to sort and shift-click to add a second sort, so the rows you need land inside the first 1,000.

To rename headers or reorder columns, type SQL into the same box. The table is called data, and the column names in your result become the Markdown header:

SELECT item AS "Item", price AS "Price"
FROM data
WHERE price > 20
ORDER BY price DESC

Naming the columns also leaves out the hidden __rid row-number column. To drop duplicate rows, use SELECT DISTINCT * EXCLUDE (__rid) FROM data.

GitHub Flavored Markdown sets alignment with colons in the delimiter row. rows.page doesn't add them, so edit that row after export:

• :--- aligns the column left.
• :---: centers it.
• ---: aligns it right, which suits numbers.

| Item | Note | Price |
| :--- | :---: | ---: |
| Pipe \| tube | a \| b | 25 |
| Bracket |  | 10 |

For more than 1,000 rows, or to script the conversion, use pandas. DataFrame.to_markdown() needs the tabulate package, doesn't escape pipes, prints empty cells as nan and lets a line break split the row, so clean the cells first:

pip install pandas openpyxl tabulate

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel('sheet.xlsx').fillna('')
df = df.replace({r'\|': r'\\|', r'\n': ' '}, regex=True)
print(df.to_markdown(index=False))

tabulate right-aligns number columns (---:) and left-aligns text (:---). read_excel also turns text such as 02134 into a number unless you pass dtype={'zip': str}.

• Merged cells: Markdown has no column or row spans. Excel keeps a merged range's value in its upper-left cell only, so the other cells arrive empty.
• Formulas and formatting: copied cells carry the values Excel displays, not formulas, colors or bold text.
• Line breaks: a cell can't span lines, so rows.page joins them with a space. For another separator, run SELECT * EXCLUDE (__rid) REPLACE (replace(note, chr(10), ' / ') AS note) FROM data before exporting.
• Size: the export stops at 1,000 rows. For a bigger table, press Share and link to the hosted copy instead.