XML to Excel

How to convert an XML file to Excel

1. Load the XML. Paste it, choose the file, or drop it on the box. The browser parses it in this tab.
2. Check which element became the rows. The repeated element with the most occurrences is used, and its path is shown above the table.
3. Read the columns. Attributes and child elements are columns; nested children are dotted columns; repeated leaf values are joined with a semicolon.
4. Download. .xlsx to open in Excel, CSV for anything else. Values are written as text, so references like 000417 keep their zeros.

The real question: which element is a row?

A table has rows and columns; XML has a tree. Converting one into the other means deciding which element is "one record". In an order export that is <order>; in a product feed it is <item>; in an e-invoice it may be the line items. The answer is almost always the element that repeats the most, so that is what this page uses — and it prints the path it chose, for example orders/order, so a wrong guess is visible before you download anything.

How the columns are named

• Attributes become columns without the @: <order id="1001"> gives a column id. If a child element has the same name, the attribute keeps its @ so neither overwrites the other.
• A leaf element is its text: <customer>Ada Byron</customer> is a cell, not a nested object.
• Nested elements become dotted columns: customer.country, total.currency.
• An element with both attributes and text gives a text column next to the attribute columns.
• Records that lack a field get an empty cell; columns are the union of every record, in the order they first appear.

What Excel's own XML import asks of you

Excel can open XML: Data → Get Data → From File → From XML, or the older XML Source pane on the Developer tab. As Microsoft's import guide explains, without a schema reference Excel infers one from the data and builds an XML map from it, and files are imported through that map. That is the right tool for a recurring feed with a published schema. For "I have one XML file and want to look at it as a table", it is a lot of machinery, and the forum threads in the results are about what happens when the inferred map and the next file disagree.

What it will not do

• Validate against a schema. It reads the document you give it; it does not check it against an XSD.
• Split one document into several sheets. One repeated element becomes one table. If the file holds two unrelated lists, the longer one wins — extract the other part and run it again.
• Fix broken XML. A document that does not parse is reported with the parser's own message, which names the line and column.

When the same feed arrives every month

If an XML export is one of the files you reconcile each period, the conversion is the first step of a job. TableDI 2 is a desktop app for file work you redo every period: it keeps your sources, rules and delivery as a job, so next month you drop in the new files and run it again. Everything runs on your own machine.