Convert pg_dump to Excel
Upload a .backup or .dump file and get back a Excel file. 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 Excel
Generated from the converter's own Excel type mapping — this is what it actually emits, not an example.
| Your data | Excel type |
|---|---|
| Whole number | number |
| Decimal (money) | number |
| Floating point | number |
| True / false | boolean |
| Date | date |
| Date and time | date |
| Short text | text |
| Long text | text |
| Binary data | hex text |
Working from a pg_dump file
pg_dump has enough flags to change what its output even contains, and a few of them decide whether the file in front of you is convertible at all. These are the ones that matter here.
- →pg_dump -Fc and a plain pg_dump > file.sql both work, and so does --inserts or --column-inserts, though neither is necessary: the default COPY output is read too.
- →--schema-only gives you the tables with no rows in them. That is a valid conversion, and almost never the one that was wanted.
- →--data-only is the opposite problem: rows arrive with no CREATE TABLE to name their columns, and the conversion says so rather than inventing names for them.
- →Ownership and privilege statements are dropped while the archive is unpacked, so a dump taken as one role converts without that role having to exist anywhere.
What opens the converted workbook
Choosing Excel as the target puts no copy of Excel anywhere in the process: the workbook is assembled on the server by a library and handed over finished. What that library writes is what decides how the result behaves when you open it.
- →The output is .xlsx, the OOXML format, and only that. There is no .xls option, so a machine that can open nothing newer than Excel 97-2003 needs the CSV target and a save from there instead.
- →Values are the only thing written. No formulas, no macros, no charts, no column widths, no frozen header row - which is why the first thing most people do with it is widen a column. If Excel opens it in Protected View, that is the mark of the web on a downloaded file rather than anything in the workbook.
- →A conversion is capped at a million rows across all of its tables, and a worksheet holds 1,048,576, so no table can ever arrive too tall for the sheet it is being written into.
Reading pg_dump
- →Reads pg_dump custom-format archives (.backup, .dump) — pgAdmin's default backup option — as well as plain SQL dumps.
- →Data written as COPY blocks is read, not just INSERT statements. COPY is pg_dump's default, so a reader that only understands INSERT returns your tables with none of their rows.
- →Primary keys declared by a later ALTER TABLE, which is how pg_dump writes them, are preserved.
Writing Excel
- →One file per table. Booleans stay booleans and numbers stay numbers.
- →Excel has no fixed-point type, so decimals become numbers — use a database target if exactness matters.
What you get
A ZIP containing <table>.xlsx. If anything about your data needed a judgement call, a _warnings.txt explains it.
Questions
- Is converting pg_dump to Excel 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 pg_dump data keep its types in Excel?
- Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real Excel 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.