How do I paste a Markdown table into Google Sheets?

A Markdown table is plain text that only looks like a grid:

| Item   | Qty | Price |
| ------ | --: | ----: |
| Pens   |  12 |  4.50 |
| Paper  |   3 | 11.00 |

The vertical bars and the row of dashes are instructions for a Markdown renderer. Google Sheets has no Markdown renderer. When you paste plain text, it puts each line in its own row and splits a line into cells only on tab characters. A pipe is just another character, so every line lands in a single cell of column A, bars and all.

You meet these tables in README files, GitHub issues, Obsidian and other Markdown notes, documentation sites, exported Notion pages and AI answers. If the table came from ChatGPT or another chat assistant, the ChatGPT table guide covers the chat-specific copy tricks; this page deals with Markdown source from anywhere.

One shortcut first: if the table is rendered somewhere (a GitHub page, a docs site), select the rendered table in the browser and copy that instead of the source. The clipboard then holds an HTML table, which Sheets usually pastes as a grid. The methods below are for when you only have the Markdown text.

This is the most reliable route, because an import parses a file with a known separator instead of guessing at a paste.

1. Paste the Markdown table into Markdown Table to CSV. The CSV appears straight away; the counters show how many rows and columns were found.
2. Download the .csv file.
3. In Google Sheets, open a spreadsheet and click File > Import, then upload the file.
4. Pick an import location: Create new spreadsheet, Insert new sheets, Replace current sheet, Append rows to current sheet or Replace data starting at selected cell.
5. Under Separator character, leave Detect automatically or choose Comma, then click Import.

What the converter does to the table:

• The alignment row (| --- | --: |) is dropped, because it is formatting, not data.
• The padding spaces around each value are trimmed, so Pens is Pens, not Pens.
• A pipe written as \| inside a cell becomes a literal |.
• Cells containing a comma, a double quote or a line break are wrapped in quotes and escaped, so they stay in one cell.

Its limits, honestly:

• One table at a time. If you paste a document with several tables, only the first becomes CSV. Markdown Table to Excel finds every table and its Copy button puts tab-separated cells on the clipboard, which paste straight into Sheets as a grid.
• The alignment row is required. A block of piped lines with no --- row under the header is not recognised as a table.
• Markdown inside cells stays. **bold**, backticks, links and <br> tags are kept as typed. Strip them first with Remove Markdown Formatting if they should not be in the data.
• Types are decided by Sheets. CSV has no types, so Sheets reads 012 as the number 12 and may read values like 3/4 as dates. See the checks at the end.

If you would rather stay inside Sheets, the built-in splitter works on a pasted table.

1. Click cell A1 of an empty sheet and paste the Markdown table. Every row lands in column A.
2. Keep the pasted cells selected and click Data > Split text to columns. (Straight after a paste you can also click the small paste icon and choose Split text to columns.)
3. In the Separator dropdown, choose Custom and type |.

The rows now spread across columns, with some clean-up left:

• Empty first and last columns. Each row starts and ends with a pipe, so there is nothing before the first one and nothing after the last. Delete those columns.
• The alignment row. The --- row is now a row of dashes. Delete it.
• Padding spaces. Every value still has the spaces Markdown used to line the columns up, so a lookup for Pens will not match Pens. Select the data and click Data > Data cleanup > Trim whitespace. Google notes that non-breaking spaces are not trimmed.
• Escaped pipes. A \| inside a cell is split like any other pipe, which shifts the rest of that row one column to the right.

Check any row that had empty cells: make sure its values still sit under the right headers before you build anything on top of the data.

A formula is handy when the Markdown will change and you want the grid to follow. With the raw table in column A, put this in B1 and fill it down:

=ARRAYFORMULA(TRIM(SPLIT(A1, "|", TRUE, FALSE)))

The last argument matters. By default, SPLIT removes empty text, which treats two pipes in a row as one. That deletes empty cells, and every value after an empty cell shifts left into the wrong column. Setting the fourth argument (remove_empty_text) to FALSE keeps empty cells in place. The price is that the empty first and last columns come back, so you ignore or delete them. TRIM removes the padding spaces.

You still need to delete the alignment row, and the escaped-pipe problem from method 2 applies here too. When the data is final, copy the results and paste them back as values only, so the sheet no longer depends on the raw column.

Google Docs can read Markdown even though Sheets cannot. In Docs, turn it on under Tools > Preferences > Enable Markdown, then right-click and choose Paste from Markdown. The table arrives as a real Docs table with the bold, links and code rendered. Copying that table and pasting it into Sheets usually brings the grid across, and it is a reasonable route when the table also needs to live in a document. Check the result: rich-text pastes can carry formatting you do not want in a spreadsheet.

Whichever method you use, check these before relying on the numbers:

• Leading zeros. IDs and codes such as 007 become the number 7. Format the destination column as plain text before importing or pasting.
• Dates you did not ask for. Values like 3/4 or 1-2 can be read as dates. Undo, format the column as plain text, and import again.
• Numbers stored as text. Values with currency symbols, thousands separators or a trailing % may arrive left-aligned as text. Remove the symbols or reformat the column.
• Decimal commas. In locales that write 4,50 for four and a half, check which separator the source used before importing a comma-separated file.

Sources for the steps above: Google Docs Editors Help, Import data sets & spreadsheets, Split text, remove duplicates, or trim whitespace, SPLIT function and Use Markdown in Google Docs, Slides, & Drawings. Checked October 2026.