XLS to XML with your own root and row element names

Many government portals, EDI gateways and older enterprise systems accept XML only, while the data you have sits in an Excel 97 to 2003 workbook. Building the XML by hand or with a macro is fragile, and one unescaped ampersand makes the whole file invalid.

This converter writes well formed XML from the old binary format, with element names you choose. For newer workbooks see XLSX to XML or Excel to XML, and to read XML back into a sheet use XML to Excel.

How to convert XLS to XML in three steps

1. 1Upload the .xls workbook.
2. 2Confirm the header row and set the root and row element names.
3. 3Convert and download the .xml file.

Turning spreadsheet headers into valid XML element names

XML element names have stricter rules than spreadsheet headers. They cannot start with a digit, cannot contain spaces, slashes or most punctuation, and are case sensitive. A header like 2026 Unit Price (USD) cannot be used as is. The converter turns it into a valid name by replacing illegal characters with underscores and prefixing a leading digit, so the output always parses.

Values are escaped on the way out. Ampersands, angle brackets and quotes inside cells are written as entities, and control characters that XML 1.0 forbids, which sometimes hide in old XLS text from terminal systems, are removed. The file is written in UTF-8 with an XML declaration, so characters from the regional code page of the old workbook arrive intact.

If the receiving system validates against an XSD, the element names and the date format are usually what fails first. Rename your headers in the workbook to match the schema exactly and set the date format to ISO. If the target accepts JSON instead, XLS to JSON is simpler, and to move between the two formats later there is XML to JSON.