HTML table generator

What it's for

It generates semantic HTML table code (with thead and tbody) from data you already have in a spreadsheet or list. Just paste it and copy the result into your site or article.

Recognized formats

Each line is a table row; cells can be separated by comma, semicolon or tab (so you can paste straight from Excel or Google Sheets). Special text is escaped automatically.

What comes out, and why it's built that way

What comes out isn't a block of div elements laid out in a grid: it's a real table, with the header inside thead and the heading cells as th. The difference isn't cosmetic. A screen reader, reaching a cell, announces the column it belongs to («Price: 12 euros») only if that column is declared as a heading; with div elements it reads a row of numbers with no context, and that's the difference between a table you can consult and a wall of data.

For the same reason the code that comes out is clean and free of inline styles: colour and borders are the job of the CSS on the site hosting it, and an unstyled table fits in instead of clashing.

Tables are for data, not for layout

It's a twenty-year-old rule and it still holds: you use a table when the data has rows and columns with a meaning — a price list, a timetable, a comparison, a set of accounts. You don't use one to put two things side by side on a page: CSS grids are for that, and they adapt to the screen, while a hand-laid-out table becomes unreadable on a phone.

On a phone it needs putting inside something that scrolls

A table with five columns doesn't fit a phone: either it squashes into unreadable little columns, or it overflows and makes the whole page scroll sideways, which is the worse defect because it breaks everything else too. The fix is one line: wrap the table in a container with overflow-x: auto and give it a min-width. Then it scrolls by itself, and the page stays put.

Nearby tools

If the data comes from a spreadsheet, it's worth cleaning it first with Clean CSV; if it has to go back into Excel the page is CSV to Excel. For a markdown table, to drop into a document or an answer, there is Markdown table generator, and to pull a table out of a PDF Extract tables from a PDF.