Convert XLSX to PostgreSQL

Upload a .xlsx or .xls file and get back a PostgreSQL SQL script you can load straight into your database. Types are preserved rather than flattened to text. Free, no registration, up to 10MB.

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CSV, Excel, SQLite, SQL, DBF (max 10 MB)

How your data is typed in PostgreSQL

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

Your dataPostgreSQL 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.

What the PostgreSQL script contains

The conversion produces one dump.sql with a README beside it, zipped. It is a script you can open, grep and edit before you run it rather than an archive a tool has to unpack, and it is deliberately sparing in what it declares.

  • Every string column is declared TEXT, whatever length the source declared for it. PostgreSQL stores a short value in a TEXT column exactly as cheaply as in a VARCHAR, and an unbounded column cannot reject a row on load for being a few characters too long.
  • Identifiers are all double-quoted, and even so a name on PostgreSQL's reserved list is given a trailing underscore: a column called user arrives as user_, order as order_, limit as limit_.
  • A decimal column whose source declared no scale is given six decimal places rather than none, keeping whatever precision it did declare: NUMERIC(10,6) from a source that said 10, and NUMERIC(18,6) from one that declared neither. A scale of zero would have the server round 19.99 to 20 as it loaded.

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 PostgreSQL

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