Convert Excel to PGSQL

Upload a .xlsx or .xls file and get back a PGSQL 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 PGSQL

Generated from the converter's own PGSQL type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.

Your dataPGSQL type
Whole numberBIGINT
Decimal (money)NUMERIC(10,2)
Floating pointDOUBLE PRECISION
True / falseBOOLEAN
DateDATE
Date and timeTIMESTAMP
Short textTEXT
Long textTEXT
Binary dataBYTEA

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.

Loading into an application's database

PGSQL is the name PostgreSQL wears inside application code: PHP's pgsql extension, Laravel's pgsql connection driver, the pdo_pgsql DSN prefix. If that is where you met the name, the database you are loading into probably belongs to a framework, which changes what to watch for.

  • The script creates its own tables. Point it at a schema your migrations own and the next migration run and this file will disagree about who defines the table - load into an empty schema, or a database of its own, and point the application at that.
  • Because every identifier is double-quoted, the case the source used is the case that gets stored. A column that arrives as "CustomerID" has to be quoted in your queries too: an unquoted CustomerID folds to customerid and is not found.
  • No FOREIGN KEY, index or view statement is generated at all, so a framework that introspects the database finds unrelated tables. Declare the relations in your models, or add them with ALTER TABLE once the rows are in.

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 PGSQL

  • Backslashes are left alone, because PostgreSQL treats them as ordinary characters — doubling them would corrupt every Windows path.
  • Auto-increment columns become GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY.
  • Binary data is written as bytea, and identifiers respect the 63-character limit.

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 PostgreSQL:

  psql -U USER -d DATABASE -f dump.sql

Create the database first if it does not exist:

  createdb -U USER DATABASE

Questions

Is converting Excel to PGSQL 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 PGSQL?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real PGSQL 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.

This conversion, under other names

Convert Excel to something else

Convert something else to PGSQL