LaTeX to Excel Converter
Paste LaTeX tabular environments from papers or theses and download the data as an Excel workbook.
How to Convert LaTeX Tables to Excel
- Paste your LaTeX - a single environment or a whole paper. You can also upload .tex or .txt files, several at a time.
- Read the count - the summary says how many tabular environments were found and how many rows they contain.
- Download XLSX - one sheet per table, ready to edit in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
What the Parser Does to Your Source
Each tabular, tabular*, tabularx or longtable environment is located by its begin and end markers. The column specification that follows \begin{tabular}, plus any width or placement argument, is skipped; rules such as \hline, \cline, \toprule, \midrule and \bottomrule are removed. What remains is split into rows on \\, including the spacing form \\[6pt], and each row is split into cells on unescaped ampersands.
Every cell is then cleaned: wrapping commands are unwrapped to their contents repeatedly, so \textbf{\emph{Total}} becomes Total; bare commands are dropped; escaped characters become plain ones; and runs of whitespace collapse to a single space. Empty rows left over from rules and blank lines are discarded.
Edge Cases and Limits
- Spanning cells are not reconstructed.
\multicolumn{2}{c}{Total}arrives as the text 2{c}{Total} in a single cell, and\multirowbehaves the same way. Fix those cells after import. - Comments are data. Nothing strips a leading %, so a commented-out row is imported like any other.
- Math stays literal.
$\alpha$and$x^2$come through as source text, which is usually what you want in a data column but never renders. - All values are text, including plain numbers. Convert the numeric columns afterwards with Convert Text to Number.
- Captions, labels and notes that live outside the tabular environment are ignored, so the sheet holds only the table body.
- Sheets are named Table 1, Table 2 in document order; the caption is not used as a name.
- Uploads are decoded with encoding detection, so a .tex file saved as UTF-16 or windows-1252 reads correctly.
A Short Checklist After Import
A converted paper table is usually 90% right and needs the same handful of fixes. Working through them in this order takes a minute:
- Repair spanning headers. Any cell reading like
2{c}{Total}was a\multicolumn; retype the label and, if you want, merge the cells in Excel. - Delete rows that began with %. Commented-out rows are imported as data.
- Convert the numeric columns with Convert Text to Number, since every cell arrives as text.
- Check the thousands separators. A value written as 1{,}234 in the source loses its braces and arrives as text; decide whether you want 1,234 or 1234 before converting.
- Merge two-line headers. Papers often split a header across two rows with a
\clinebetween them; those become two spreadsheet rows.
When to Use a Different Tool
For the opposite direction, Excel to LaTeX writes a tabular environment with all the reserved characters escaped. Tables that started life as Markdown are handled by Markdown to Excel, HTML tables by HTML to Excel, and a data file pasted from a paper's appendix by CSV to Excel. After conversion, Excel Editor is the quickest way to repair spanning headers in the browser.
Frequently Asked Questions
tabular, tabular*, tabularx and longtable. The column specification and any width or placement argument right after \begin are skipped, and \hline, \cline, \toprule, \midrule and \bottomrule are stripped. A tabular wrapped in \begin{table} with a caption is fine - the float, the caption and the label sit outside the environment and are ignored.
They are not understood. Only single-argument commands are unwrapped, so \multicolumn{2}{c}{Total} comes through as the literal text 2{c}{Total} in one cell, and spanning rows are not reconstructed. Tables with spanning headers need those cells fixed by hand after conversion - the data rows underneath convert normally.
No. A row that you commented out with a leading % is still split on its ampersands and imported, with the % kept in the first cell. Delete commented rows from the input, or delete the row in Excel afterwards.
Commands that wrap text - \textbf{}, \emph{}, \texttt{} and the like - are unwrapped to their contents, including when they are nested, and bare commands such as \small or \centering are dropped. Escaped characters (\%, \&, \_, \#, \$, \{, \}) become the plain character. Inline math is left exactly as written, so $x^2$ arrives in the cell as $x^2$ rather than as a typeset value.
No. Every cell is written as text, because LaTeX source carries no type information and a value like 1,234 or 12.5\% would be guessed wrongly. Use Excel's Convert to Number, or our Convert Text to Number tool, on the columns you need to calculate with.
Yes. Paste the entire document or upload the .tex file: every tabular environment in it becomes a separate sheet, named Table 1, Table 2 and so on in document order. Several .tex files at once come back as a ZIP of workbooks.