Markdown table formatter
Processed in your browser · nothing is uploaded
Pads every cell so the pipes line up in the source, which makes a markdown table readable before it is rendered. It also builds a table from pasted CSV or tab-separated data.
How to use the markdown table formatter
Alignment changes nothing about how the table renders — markdown does not care whether the pipes line up — and everything about whether the source is readable in a pull request. A table maintained by hand drifts out of alignment within a few edits, and an unaligned table is where a missing cell hides.
The separator row is the part that carries meaning. --- is a plain column, :--- left-aligns, ---: right-aligns and :---: centres, and those colons survive here rather than being padded away. A table with the wrong number of separator cells does not render as a table at all, which is the most common reason a pasted table appears as a row of pipes.
When building from pasted data, a tab is detected automatically, which matters because copying a range out of a spreadsheet gives tab-separated text, not CSV, and pasting it into a CSV tool produces one very wide column.
Questions
No. It only makes the source readable, which is where the value is, in a diff.
Put a colon at the right of the separator: ---:. Left is :---, centre is :---:.
Usually the separator row has the wrong number of cells, or there is no blank line before the table.
Yes. A tab separator is detected automatically, which is what a spreadsheet copy actually gives you.
No. Everything runs in your browser, which matters when the file holds credentials or customer data.