Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa)

https://thisdavej.com/copy-table-in-excel-and-paste-as-a-markdown-table/

by thisdavej • 1 year ago

114 15 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

jamesgill2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I prefer https://tableconvert.com/

jamesgill2• 1 year ago

Thanks, never seen that one. It's quite slick.

figomore• 1 year ago

I use this one https://www.tablesgenerator.com/

haberdasher• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Cool tool!

Anyone have recommendations for a command line solution on Linux? :)

speerer• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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/

thangalin• 1 year ago

KeenWrite[1] is my FOSS Markdown editor, which is based heavily on CommonMark. The editor can call R functions (with a knitr-compatible syntax[2]). The tutorials[3] demo embedding CSV file contents. This creates a "living" document in that changing the contents of the CSV data (the source of truth) changes the output document.

[1] https://keenwrite.com

[2] https://yihui.org/knitr

[3] https://youtu.be/XSbTF3E5p7Q?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

junto• 1 year ago

Just a side note. That cookie consent banner is a clusterf$$k. Happy to accept essential cookies only, but not even a reject button is available. Thank god for iOS “hide distracting items”.

Copy Excel to Markdown Table (and vice versa)

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