Convert PostgreSQL backup 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 PostgreSQL backup
A PostgreSQL backup is not one thing. pg_dump can write plain SQL, a compressed custom-format archive or a tar archive, and all three routinely end up carrying the same .dump or .backup extension.
- →The first five bytes decide: PGDMP means an archive, which is unpacked with pg_restore, and anything else is treated as plain SQL. The extension is never trusted for this.
- →pg_restore is run with --file=- to print SQL to a pipe, so your backup is converted without ever being restored into a live PostgreSQL server: nothing connects to a database and nothing is created.
- →The directory format, pg_dump -Fd, is a folder rather than a file and cannot be uploaded. Re-dump it as -Fc or as plain SQL.
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 PostgreSQL backup
- →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 PostgreSQL backup 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 PostgreSQL backup 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.