📋 Markdown Table Generator

Paste comma- or tab-separated data with a header row and get a ready-to-paste Markdown table, with columns automatically padded to line up.

Data (comma or tab separated, first row is the header)

How the table is assembled

The delimiter is decided by the first line alone: if it contains a tab the whole input is treated as tab-separated, otherwise as comma-separated. Blank lines are dropped, every cell is trimmed, and the header row fixes the column count. Each column is then padded to the widest value in it, with a floor of three characters so the dashes below always form a valid separator.

Name, Role, Location        | Name  | Role     | Location |
Alice, Engineer, Remote  ->  |-------|----------|----------|
Bob, Designer, New York     | Alice | Engineer | Remote   |
                            | Bob   | Designer | New York |

The padding is cosmetic. Markdown renders a ragged table identically, but the aligned version stays readable in the raw file, which is where most people end up editing it.

Getting your data in cleanly

Copy straight from a spreadsheet. Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers all put tab-separated text on the clipboard, so a pasted selection is detected as TSV automatically.
The header row is required - it is row one, and it sets how many columns every other row is cut or padded to. A row with extra fields loses the overflow; a short row is filled with blanks.
Quoted CSV is not parsed. A comma inside "New York, NY" splits the cell in two. Switch that data to tab-separated first.

A literal | in a cell will break the table. Type it as \| in your source data so Markdown treats it as content rather than a column boundary.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert Excel data to a Markdown table?

Select the cells including the header, copy, and paste into the box above. The clipboard content is tab-separated, so the table appears immediately with no reformatting needed.

Can I set column alignment?

Not here - the separator row is plain dashes, which every renderer treats as left-aligned. Add a colon by hand afterwards: |---:| right-aligns a column and |:---:| centres it.

Do the columns have to line up for Markdown to work?

No. Renderers only need a pipe between cells and a dashed second row. The padding here is for humans reading the raw text.