Excel to Markdown table

What a spreadsheet brings that a plain CSV does not

• Merged cells. Markdown has no row or column spans. The value sits in the top-left cell of the merge and the rest are empty — which is what the file says. If the merge was a heading, you usually want to delete that row in the box before converting.
• Formula cells. You get the value Excel last calculated, not the formula. That is right for a table meant to be read, and it means a workbook whose formulas were never calculated shows blanks — open it in Excel once and save.
• Number formatting. A cell displaying €8,600.00 holds the number 8600. Markdown has no formatting, so add the symbol to the header (Revenue (€)) rather than to every cell.

The three things that break a hand-made Markdown table

• A pipe inside a cell. A value like b|c ends the cell early and shifts every column after it. Pipes are escaped as \|.
• A line break inside a cell. Markdown tables are one row per line, so a cell containing a newline splits the row. It becomes <br>, which renders as a line break inside the cell on GitHub and most wikis.
• Ragged rows. A row with fewer cells than the header produces a malformed table; short rows are padded.

Aligned source, or compact source

With padding on, columns are padded with spaces so the raw Markdown lines up in an editor — worth it for a table someone will hand-edit later. With it off you get the compact form: smaller in a diff, and it renders identically.

A table that gets regenerated every release

Converting once by hand is fine. A table that has to be rebuilt from a source file on every release belongs in the release script.