How to excel to json without breaking your data

Operations sends an .xlsx, engineering needs JSON, and the conversion happens by exporting to CSV first — which is exactly where merged cells and leading zeros get destroyed.

You see this most often in handover files, imported catalogues, client data drops. Save-as-CSV flattens merged cells by repeating or dropping values, and converts ID columns to numbers.

Doing it in four steps

1. Drop the .xlsx file
2. Read the parsed table
3. Check the column count matches your expectation
4. Copy the JSON

The whole thing runs locally in the browser tab: no upload, no account, no queue. When the page says "removed 37 lines", that number comes from the file you just pasted, not from a sample.

Because the workbook is parsed rather than converted to CSV first, an identifier column keeps the zeros that an export would strip.

For the full picture — imports, feeds, variants, identifiers — see the pillar guide: Shopify product data management.

Try it on your own file

Open Excel to JSON and paste a sample. It is free, it does not store anything, and you do not need an account. If the file is sensitive, save the page locally and run it offline.

Questions people ask

Is the file uploaded?

No — the workbook is parsed in the browser using the built-in decompressor.

What about merged cells?

The merged value appears once, in the top-left cell, and the rest of the row stays empty rather than shifted.