[HN Gopher] Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa)
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       Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa)
        
       Author : thisdavej
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2025-05-30 00:32 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thisdavej.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thisdavej.com)
        
       | Telemakhos wrote:
       | This... this is what I needed three days ago. I've got tools on
       | my Mac to do lots of text conversions, but I don't have anything
       | that does tables-to-markdown, sadly.
        
         | hermitcrab wrote:
         | Easy Data Transform has Mac and Windows native versions and can
         | do Excel to markdown:
         | 
         | https://www.easydatatransform.com/convert_excel_to_markdown....
         | 
         | It can also do it in batch mode (plus lots more besides).
        
       | its_down_again wrote:
       | FWIW I built a streamlit app to extrapolate tribal knowledge in
       | excel trackers into markdown wikis for vector database ingestion.
       | Instead of uploading raw tables, it maps sheet headers to real
       | headings to wrap each section in wiki-type format context pages.
       | The UI lets you pick out QA sections from local files, but I'm
       | stuck on how to persist selections and configs for repeat runs.
       | Curious how others would tackle the issue of repeatable settings.
       | 
       | Code's here: https://github.com/devin-liu/excel-to-markdown
        
       | jamesgill wrote:
       | Nice. There's also a good VS Code plugin for doing this:
       | https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=csholmq....
       | 
       | And of course, markdowntools (multiple conversion tools):
       | https://www.markdowntools.com/
        
         | abdullahkhalids wrote:
         | I prefer https://tableconvert.com/
        
           | jamesgill wrote:
           | Thanks, never seen that one. It's quite slick.
        
       | haberdasher wrote:
       | If you have to go from an HTML table to Markdown, you can use
       | Table Capture: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/table-
       | capture/iebpj...
        
       | jquaint wrote:
       | Cool tool!
       | 
       | Anyone have recommendations for a command line solution on Linux?
       | :)
        
         | speerer wrote:
         | You could potentially do a pipeline -
         | 
         | first converting xlsx to csv with libreoffice using
         | approximately: `soffice --convert-to csv *xlsx`,
         | 
         | followed by `pandoc in.csv -o out.md`.
         | 
         | [Edit: The more I think about it, the more I can see lots of
         | ways this could go wrong.]
        
       | speakspokespok wrote:
       | This is a very handy tool.
       | 
       | For those of us who sometimes have to do presentations but don't
       | want to (learn) do full blown slidedecks I have a feature
       | request:
       | 
       | If you could add googlesheets to mermaid.js table or googlesheets
       | straight to png of a markdown table that would be so nice. As I
       | recall Mermaid.js renders to png.
       | 
       | Easy way to build tables, I can just insert the image of the
       | table.
        
       | iaad wrote:
       | Worked on something very similar recently at work.
       | 
       | If you want to respect more of Excels formatting, like multi
       | column cells, you can get the text/html from the paste event
       | instead of the text/plain.
       | 
       | You can parse the HTML using DOMParser: parseFromString()
        
       | ornel wrote:
       | I made a version[0] of this years ago inspired by something
       | similar in MailChimp using a pasted spreadsheet. Mine converts to
       | Markdown and simpler text. I used it to send table data as plain
       | text emails
       | 
       | [0] http://mirrodriguezlombardo.com/Tablas-simples/
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-30 23:00 UTC)