Convert XLSX 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 a .xlsx file

A .xlsx file is OOXML - a zip of XML parts - and holds up to 1,048,576 rows per sheet. It also states its number formats explicitly, which is why more type information survives the trip out of .xlsx than out of any other spreadsheet format.

  • The workbook is opened for cached values only, so a formula cell converts as the number Excel last calculated for it. A file written by a script that never opened it in Excel can have those cells empty.
  • A column's number format is taken from the first data row that states one, so formatting only the header row tells the reader nothing about the column.
  • Accounting formats count as money even with no symbol in them: #,##0.00 is read as fixed-point, not as a plain number.

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 XLSX

  • 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 XLSX 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 XLSX 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 XLSX to something else

Convert something else to PGSQL