How to Convert a Markdown Table to Excel Cells
Ask ChatGPT or Claude for a table and you get Markdown — | Name | Age | lines with a |---| separator. Paste it into Excel and the whole thing stacks into one column. Here's how to get it back into real, clean cells.
Last updated: September 2026
| Pasted (one column) | Clean cells | |
|---|---|---|
| | Name | Age | | → | Name · Age |
| | Ana | 30 | | → | Ana · 30 |
Method 1 — Text to Columns
- Select the column, Data ▸ Text to Columns ▸ Delimited, and tick Other: |.
- The outer pipes leave an empty first and last column — delete them.
- Delete the
|---|separator row, then trim the stray spaces around each value.
It works, but it's three or four clean-up steps every time, and escaped \| pipes inside a cell get split by mistake.
Method 2 — the 1-click way (Tellsheet)
Markdown to Table
Select the pasted table and run Markdown to Table. It parses the Markdown — stripping the outer pipes, dropping the |---| alignment row, and honouring escaped \| pipes — and writes clean cells to a new sheet. Numeric-looking cells become real numbers (you can turn that off). It reads the table whether it arrived as one line per row or as a single multi-line cell. The exact inverse of Export Table As (which turns a range into Markdown for pasting back into ChatGPT). Pairs with JSON to Columns.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a Markdown table to Excel?
Text to Columns on the pipe then tidy up, or Tellsheet's Markdown to Table in one click.
Why does the table paste into one column?
Excel doesn't split on the pipe character, so each row lands in one cell.
Does it keep numbers as numbers?
Yes — numeric cells become real numbers, or keep them as text with one switch.
Can I go the other way?
Yes — Export Table As turns a range into a Markdown table for pasting into an AI chat.
Related Excel guides
Get AI tables into Excel, clean
Markdown to Table turns a pasted ChatGPT/Claude table into real cells — in one click.
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