Typing a Markdown table by hand is slow: every row needs pipes, the separator row needs dashes, and one missing | breaks the whole table. If your data is already in a spreadsheet, you can convert it in seconds.
Step by step
- In Excel or Google Sheets, select the cells you want, including the header row.
- Copy them (Ctrl + C, or Cmd + C on a Mac).
- Open the Markdown Table Generator and choose the CSV to Table tab.
- Paste. Spreadsheet cells arrive separated by tabs, and the tool detects that automatically.
- Copy the Markdown table that appears.
The result looks like this:
| Centre | January | February |
| -------- | ------- | -------- |
| Kazipara | 1,200 | 1,340 |
| Mirpur | 980 | 1,020 |
The columns are padded so the table is readable even as plain text.
Aligning columns
Numbers are easier to read when they line up on the right. In Markdown, alignment is set with colons in the separator row:
| Separator | Alignment |
|---|---|
:--- |
left |
:---: |
centre |
---: |
right |
In the generator's Visual Grid Editor you can click a column's alignment button to switch between left, centre and right, and it writes the colons for you.
Other ways to start
- From a CSV file: open it in a text editor, copy everything and paste it into the CSV to Table tab. Semicolon-separated files, common in Europe, are detected too.
- From JSON: paste an array of objects into the JSON to Table tab. The keys become column headers.
- Fix an existing table: paste a messy Markdown table into the Auto-Align Raw Table tab to realign it. The Markdown Cleaner can also tidy tables inside a longer document.
What Markdown tables cannot do
Markdown tables are simple on purpose. They cannot merge cells, hold line breaks inside a cell or set column widths. If a cell contains a | character, the generator escapes it as \| so the table does not break.
Where the table works
GitHub and GitLab (README files, issues and comments), Obsidian, Notion (when pasted or imported), Reddit, many documentation tools, and AI chats like ChatGPT and Claude, which read Markdown tables well.