Convert Excel to SQL Server
Upload a .xlsx or .xls file and get back a SQL Server SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.
Click to upload or drag and drop
CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)
How your data is typed in SQL Server
Generated from the converter's own SQL Server type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | SQL Server type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | BIGINT |
| Decimal (money) | DECIMAL(10,2) |
| Floating point | FLOAT |
| True / false | BIT |
| Date | DATE |
| Date and time | DATETIME2 |
| Short text | NVARCHAR(255) |
| Long text | NVARCHAR(MAX) |
| Binary data | VARBINARY(MAX) |
Working from an Excel file
"Excel" covers two entirely different file formats, and which one you have decides how much type information survives the conversion. It is worth checking what your workbook was actually saved as before you upload it.
- →Only .xls and .xlsx are recognised. A macro-enabled .xlsm, or a workbook saved as OpenDocument .ods, is refused before anything is read - save a copy as .xlsx first.
- →The two extensions take different code paths inside the reader: .xlsx through openpyxl, .xls through pandas and xlrd, and they do not recover the same amount of information from the file.
- →Sheet names become table names with every character outside letters, digits and underscores replaced one for one, so "Q1 Sales (2024)" arrives as Q1_Sales__2024: the space and the opening bracket each leave an underscore behind, and the trailing one is trimmed.
How names and bytes are written
mssql is the short name the drivers use - the ODBC DSN, SQLAlchemy's mssql+pyodbc, the container image. What it produces is ordinary T-SQL text, and the details worth checking before you run it are how it writes names and how it writes raw bytes.
- →Identifiers are wrapped in square brackets rather than double quotes, and a bracket inside a source name is turned into an underscore before the wrapping goes on: a column named Order]Date is created as [Order_Date], so a bracket in your data can never close a name early.
- →The identifier cap is 128 characters, high enough that almost every source name survives untouched - one that Oracle would have to cut at 30 arrives here whole.
- →Binary columns are VARBINARY(MAX) and their values are written as bare 0x hex literals, with no quotes around them and no conversion function wrapped over them.
Reading Excel
- →Numbers, dates and booleans are read as Excel stored them, never converted to text and re-parsed.
- →Cell number formats are read out of .xlsx workbooks, so a column formatted as currency becomes a fixed-point decimal rather than a floating-point number — which is how money avoids acquiring a rounding tail. Legacy .xls is the exception: the xlrd path exposes no formats, so its currency columns come across as ordinary numbers.
- →A column formatted as a date becomes a date, not a timestamp at midnight; one formatted with a time keeps its time.
- →One sheet becomes one table. Empty sheets are skipped, and sheet names are sanitised for the target.
Writing SQL Server
- →String literals carry the N prefix, so non-ASCII text survives whatever collation the database uses.
- →Timestamps become DATETIME2. T-SQL’s TIMESTAMP is a row-version counter, not a point in time.
- →Identity columns are wrapped in SET IDENTITY_INSERT so explicit key values load.
- →Statements are separated with GO in batches.
What you get
A ZIP containing dump.sql, plus a README with the exact command to load it. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Load this dump into SQL Server:
sqlcmd -S HOST -U USER -P PASSWORD -d DATABASE -i dump.sql
Notes:
- Text columns are NVARCHAR and literals carry the N prefix, so
non-ASCII data survives regardless of database collation.
- Timestamps are DATETIME2. T-SQL's TIMESTAMP type is a row
version, not a point in time.Questions
- Is converting Excel to SQL Server free?
- Yes. Files up to 10MB convert free with no account. There is a limit of five conversions per day per IP address.
- Will my Excel data keep its types in SQL Server?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real SQL Server types rather than everything becoming text. The mapping table above shows exactly what you get.
- Do you store my file?
- No. The file is written to a temporary directory, converted, and the directory is deleted as soon as your download has been sent.