XML to Excel Converter

How to Convert XML to Excel

1. Upload, paste, or fetch XML - Choose an XML file, paste markup, or enter a CORS-enabled URL. The document is parsed in your browser.
2. Select the repeating record path - Review the detected repeating elements and choose which XML path should become spreadsheet rows.
3. Check flattening and namespace options - Preview the columns, decide whether to strip namespace prefixes, and confirm how attributes and repeated siblings are represented.
4. Download the XLSX workbook - Export the rectangular preview as a standard Excel workbook with one row per selected XML record.

About XML to Excel Conversion

XML is a common export format for APIs, configuration files, and legacy systems. Use this free tool to convert XML to Excel - or XML to XLSX - and turn API exports and data feeds into spreadsheet rows online, entirely in your browser.

XML Structure Handling

Our converter automatically detects repeating elements in your XML and converts them to rows. Nested elements are flattened using dot notation (e.g., "address.city") and element attributes become their own @attribute columns, so both element values and attributes are preserved when you convert XML to Excel.

Why Real-World XML Often Converts to a Single Row

The most common complaint about online XML converters is that a file with hundreds of records comes out as one enormously wide row. It happens because many converters only inspect the top level of the document. Real exports rarely put records there:

<response>            <!-- root: one child -->
  <data>              <!-- still one child -->
    <records>
      <record>...</record>   <!-- the actual rows, three levels down -->
      <record>...</record>
    </records>
  </data>
</response>

A top-level scan sees a single <data> child, finds nothing repeating, and gives up - producing one row. This converter walks the entire document instead, collects every element path that repeats, and scores each by how many times it occurs and how many distinct fields it would produce. The strongest candidate becomes the row, and the rest are offered in the Rows come from selector so you can override the choice in one click. Ties prefer the outer element, so you get one row per <record>rather than one row per repeated field inside it.

Namespaces, Attributes, and Ragged Records

• Namespaces - prefixes such as ns: are stripped from names by default so headers read name rather than ns:name. Turn it off to keep them. xmlns declarations never become columns.
• Repeated siblings - numbered from [1], so tag[1] means the same thing on every row. Converters that leave the first occurrence unnumbered misalign the column on rows that only have one.
• Mixed content - text sitting alongside child elements is kept in a #text column instead of being discarded.
• Ragged records - records with different fields are padded to a common column set, so the sheet is rectangular and sorting or filtering in Excel behaves.

How This Compares to Other XML to Excel Converters

A generic file converter can change an .xml extension into .xlsx without explaining which nodes became rows. For nested exports and API responses, that row-selection decision is the conversion.

XML-to-XLSX competitor workflows checked 2026-07-28 on the linked converter pages; their quotas and storage terms may be revised later.

XML is a tree, while a worksheet is a rectangle. This converter searches the whole tree for repeating record candidates, preserves attributes in dedicated columns, gives repeated siblings stable indexes, and pads ragged records to one column set. Without those explicit rules, a technically successful format conversion can still yield one unusable row or misaligned data.

Example XML Input

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<employees>
  <employee>
    <name>John Doe</name>
    <department>Engineering</department>
    <salary>75000</salary>
  </employee>
  <employee>
    <name>Jane Smith</name>
    <department>Marketing</department>
    <salary>65000</salary>
  </employee>
</employees>