Convert Excel to Parquet Online

Converting Excel to Parquet transforms a spreadsheet export into a format optimised for analytical processing. Parquet's columnar structure and compression make it significantly more efficient than XLSX for querying and storage — a typical Excel file compresses to 20–40% of its original size. The column schema is embedded in the Parquet file, so downstream tools read types without manual annotation.

Common use cases include loading monthly Excel reports from a business team into a data lake on S3 or GCS, preparing Excel exports for querying with Athena, BigQuery, or DuckDB, and archiving large spreadsheets in a more storage-efficient format. This is a key step for data engineers who receive data as Excel files and need to incorporate it into automated analytical pipelines.

Excel date serial numbers are automatically converted to proper timestamps in the Parquet output. Formulas are converted to their last calculated values. Only the first sheet is exported. Complex Excel features like merged cells, conditional formatting, and charts are not represented in Parquet — only the raw cell values and their inferred types.