Excel to XML with your own root and row element names

XML is still the format of product feeds, e-invoicing, banking files and many enterprise imports. Excel can save XML only through XML maps, which most people never set up, and a hand built file breaks on the first ampersand in a product name.

XlsConverter writes well formed, escaped UTF-8 XML with names you choose. For the modern workbook specifically see XLSX to XML, for plain text input see CSV to XML, and for the opposite direction use XML to Excel.

How to convert Excel to XML in three steps

1. 1Upload your Excel workbook.
2. 2Name the root and row elements and pick elements or attributes.
3. 3Convert and download the XML file.

Valid XML names and escaping when headers come from Excel

Column headers make poor XML tag names. Unit Price has a space, 2026 Sales starts with a digit, and Cost/Margin contains a slash, all of which are illegal in element names. We convert them to unit_price, _2026_sales and cost_margin, and the preview shows the mapping so you can rename any column to the exact name your schema expects.

Cell values need escaping too. Ampersands, angle brackets and quotes must become entities, and control characters that sometimes hide in pasted Excel text are not allowed in XML 1.0 at all. We escape and strip them automatically, so the file passes a strict parser. Line breaks inside cells are kept as text.

Elements versus attributes is a schema decision. Attributes are compact but cannot hold structure and are unordered, elements are verbose but flexible. Many feed specs mix both, for example an id attribute with child elements for everything else, and you can set this per column. Numbers are written without thousands separators and dates as ISO 8601, which most XSD types expect. To feed the same data to a JSON API instead, see Excel to JSON, or publish it as a web table with XLSX to HTML.