Convert XLSX to Postgres

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

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

Your dataPostgres 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.

The oldest PostgreSQL this loads into

Postgres is the informal spelling and the one most people type. Since the name says nothing about a version, the useful question for this page is which server releases the generated script runs on, and that is decided by the newest piece of syntax in it.

  • The identity clause on auto-increment columns is the newest thing in the file, and it arrived in release 10. That is the floor for loading the script unedited.
  • Everything else is far older: the hex escape the script uses for binary values has been accepted since 9.0, and jsonb, which is what a JSON column is declared as, since 9.4.
  • On a server below the floor the script still loads if you delete the identity clauses by hand. The columns keep every value they were given, because each INSERT names them explicitly; they simply stop assigning new ones.

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 Postgres

  • 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 Postgres 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 Postgres?
Yes — that is the point. Whole numbers, decimals, dates and booleans are mapped to real Postgres 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.

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