Paste the Markdown into column A, select those cells and run Data → Text to Columns, choose Delimited, tick Other and type |. Excel splits every row at the pipes. Then delete the row of hyphens and the empty first and last columns. Converting the table to tab-separated text first skips the cleanup entirely.
Excel has no Markdown import, so a pipe table arrives as text. Three documented features turn that text into cells: the Convert Text to Columns Wizard, Excel's handling of tab-separated and CSV text, and Get & Transform (Power Query). Which one to use depends on whether the table is already on your clipboard or you can take a detour through the CSV to Markdown converter, which reads Markdown tables and writes CSV or TSV. Tables built in the table generator can go either way.
What happens when you paste a Markdown table into Excel?
Every line becomes a row and the whole line goes into one cell in column A, pipes included. Excel splits pasted text at line breaks and tabs, and a Markdown table contains no tabs, so nothing is split into columns. The header, the delimiter row of hyphens and the data rows are all plain text; alignment colons, bold markers and links stay literal.
That gives you the starting point for the first route. The text is in a column, one row per table row, and all you need is to split it at the pipe character.
How do you split the pasted table with Text to Columns?
Select the cells in column A that hold the table and follow Microsoft's steps for the Convert Text to Columns Wizard: choose Data → Text to Columns, select Delimited and click Next. On the delimiters page, Microsoft's Text Import Wizard reference explains that if the character you need is not listed you select the Other check box and type it in the box; type |. Make sure Tab, Comma and Space are unticked, otherwise cells that contain spaces are split again. The Data preview at the bottom shows the columns before you commit. Click Next, choose a Destination cell if you do not want to overwrite column A, and click Finish.
The wizard also has a Treat consecutive delimiters as one option. Leave it off for a Markdown table: two pipes in a row mean an empty cell, and merging them would shift the data left.
How do you remove the separator row and the empty columns?
After the split there are three leftovers. The second row contains the --- cells from the Markdown delimiter row; delete it. Because each Markdown row begins and ends with a pipe, the first and last columns are empty; delete them too. Finally, cells keep the spaces that padded them in the Markdown source. Excel's TRIM function removes leading and trailing spaces, so a helper column with =TRIM(B2) filled down and across, pasted back as values, cleans the table. Any \| that was escaped in the Markdown keeps its backslash, because this route never parses Markdown; Find and Replace fixes those.
If the table has a bold header or links in cells, the Markdown markers (**, [text](url)) survive as text as well. The conversion route below avoids some of this because the converter unescapes pipes and drops the delimiter row before Excel ever sees the data.
Is converting to CSV or TSV first easier?
Usually, yes. Paste the Markdown into the Markdown table to CSV page, choose tab as the separator and copy the output. Pasting tab-separated text into Excel spreads it across columns directly, with no wizard, because the tab is the one separator the paste handler understands; Microsoft's text file documentation describes tab-delimited .txt as one of the two standard text formats Excel works with. The converter has already removed the hyphen row, unescaped pipes and quoted values that need it.
If you download a .csv instead, open it with File → Open. The same page says a .csv opens automatically in a new workbook, while a .txt starts the Import Text Wizard, where you can set the delimiter and the column formats. There is a trap worth knowing: when Excel opens a CSV it applies its default data formats to each column, so a column of numbers with leading zeros loses them and dates can be read in the wrong order. Microsoft's advice on that page is to rename the file from .csv to .txt so the wizard runs and you can mark such columns as Text.
How do you load the table with Power Query?
Use Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV on the CSV you downloaded. Microsoft's Power Query import guide says that for a CSV file Power Query detects the column delimiter, uses the first row as the column names and sets a data type for each column; the text file page adds that you can change the delimiter from the list under Delimiter and see the effect in the preview before loading. Click Load, or Load To to choose a destination.
The advantage over pasting is that the import is a query: keep the CSV in the same place, replace it with a new export, and Refresh reloads the table. The header row of the Markdown table becomes the column names of an Excel table. This is the route for a table you will regenerate, such as a report that a script writes as Markdown every week.
Which route should you choose?
| Situation | Route | Cleanup afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| The table is on your clipboard and small | Paste, then Text to Columns with | | Delete hyphen row and empty outer columns, trim spaces |
| You can take a detour through the browser | Convert to TSV, paste | None |
| Values contain commas, quotes or line breaks | Convert to CSV, open or import the file | None |
| Columns must keep leading zeros or exact dates | Convert to CSV, rename to .txt, use the wizard | Set column formats in step 3 |
| The table is regenerated regularly | Power Query from the CSV | None; refresh the query |
Excel can hold up to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet, per Microsoft's text import page, so size is not a factor for any table that started as Markdown.
Why are numbers right-aligned or dates wrong after pasting?
Because Excel converts what it recognises. Text that looks like a number becomes a number and is right-aligned; text that looks like a date is stored as a date in your locale's order; a value such as 007 becomes 7. Markdown has none of these types, so a column that was meant as an identifier can change. Microsoft's text file documentation calls out exactly the leading-zero and date-order cases and recommends the Import Text Wizard, where step 3 lets you set a column's format to Text. In Power Query, change the column type in the editor before loading. If a value must stay literal, formatting the destination cells as Text before pasting also works.
How do you turn an Excel range back into a Markdown table?
Copy the range and paste it into the generator's Paste CSV / TSV box or into the CSV to Markdown converter. Spreadsheet copies are tab-separated, so both tools split them correctly and escape any pipes in the values. The Excel to Markdown table page covers that direction in detail, including number formats and merged cells. For Google Sheets the steps are similar but the menu names differ; see creating a Google Sheet from a Markdown table. If the table is headed for a document rather than a spreadsheet, Markdown table to Word table is the better path.