Excel to Markdown Converter

Why excel-to-md exists

When documenting data, maintaining knowledge bases, or preparing table context for models, Excel files often enter Markdown as screenshots, copy-paste fragments, or inconsistent formatting. Manual conversion can lose headers, merged cells, empty values, and numeric precision. excel-to-md targets a narrow problem: convert .xlsx and .xls worksheets into stable, renderable Markdown tables while preserving the original structure as much as possible.

How it works

The skill runs on Python 3 with openpyxl and pandas, treating workbooks as read-only inputs. Common workflows include converting an Excel file by default, writing to an explicit output path, previewing without saving, listing worksheets, converting selected sheets, and batch-processing all Excel files in a directory.

The output follows Markdown table conventions: ordinary cells are emitted as-is, merged cells place the value in the first cell and leave the rest empty, dates become YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, overly long content is truncated to 200 characters, and header rows use --- separators with multi-row header support. The design emphasizes idempotency, no source-file mutation, and explicit output paths, making it suitable for scripts, repeated runs, and documentation pipelines.

Scope and limits

It fits office-efficiency tasks where table data needs to move into notes, wikis, READMEs, or prompt context. It does not cover complex formula evaluation, pivot analysis, chart reconstruction, style preservation, or HTML/JSON generation. Merged cells are flattened into a text table, so semantically dense sheets may need manual annotations. For batch conversion, confirm file naming and destination paths before writing to avoid overwriting existing Markdown documents.