XLSX to LaTeX Converter

Results usually live in a spreadsheet long before they reach a paper. Retyping a table of thirty rows into LaTeX means writing every value, an & between each pair of cells and \\ at the end of every row, and a single missing separator shifts a whole column. It is slow, and errors are hard to spot in the source.

Special characters make it worse. Values such as 12%, p_value, $4.20 or R&D are ordinary text in Excel but commands in LaTeX, so pasting them unchanged either breaks the build or silently drops part of the cell. The LaTeX2e reference lists ten such characters, and a typical data table contains several of them.

The converter writes the table code from the sheet itself: one column per spreadsheet column, every value in its cell, and every reserved character escaped.

The result is plain text, so you can read and edit it in any editor or straight in Overleaf. It contains a tabular environment with a column specification, the header row and the data rows. Values are exported as Excel displays them, which means number formats such as two decimal places or thousands separators come through the way you set them in the sheet.

Many journals and thesis templates prefer tables without vertical lines and with three horizontal rules. The booktabs package provides them as \toprule, \midrule and \bottomrule. Add the line above to your preamble, then replace the generated \hline rules with those commands; the rest of the table stays as it is.

For a caption, a label and a position on the page, wrap the tabular in a table environment and reference it with \ref. Keeping the generated code in its own file, for example results.tex, and pulling it in with \input{results} makes it easy to regenerate the table when the numbers change.

A little tidying in Excel saves editing in LaTeX. Put the table on the first sheet, or choose all sheets, and remove helper columns and notes that should not appear in the paper. Set the number formats you want to print, because the displayed values are what gets exported. Merged header cells are best split into plain cells, since LaTeX handles spanning columns with its own commands.

You can convert up to 20 workbooks at a time, each up to 95 MB, and uploads are deleted after processing, the .tex files 30 minutes later. For other targets, the Document Converter also makes Word, HTML and Markdown, the Data Converter page produces CSV and JSON, and old workbooks can first be brought up to date with XLS to XLSX.

Tables in a paper tend to change several times before submission: a reviewer asks for another column, a re-run shifts the third decimal, a sample is excluded. If the table was typed by hand, each change means editing LaTeX source and hoping nothing else moved. If it comes from the sheet, you update the numbers in Excel and convert again.

That works best when the generated file is never edited by hand. Put any styling, such as booktabs rules or column alignment, in a small wrapper around the \input line, and let the converted file hold only the data. Each time you regenerate it, the wrapper stays as it was and the paper picks up the new numbers on the next compile.

Co-authors benefit too: everyone edits the spreadsheet they already know, and only one person needs to run the conversion before the final build.