How to get reasonably formated text tables out of excel for use as plain text or Markdown [closed]

Question

I had the following situation:

Spreadsheet used to calculate pricing for a bunch of different kinds of trees. (I'm a tree farmer)

This data has two uses:

1. I use it in Markdown to make tables on my web page.
2. I use it in kijiji ads.

The latter made things sticky. Cut and paste from excel leaves data separated by single tabs. Nothing lines up. A pasted table in excel in some program like Kijiji looks like this:

|   Bareroot Bundles of 25 2-3 year olds                            ||||
|   Bundles |   # Trees |   Cost    |   Price Per Tree  |
|:  -------------   :|: ------- :|: ------- :|: ------------------- :|
|   5 Trees |   5   |   $30.00  |   $6.00   |
|   Single Bundle   |   25  |   $75.00  |   $3.00   |
|   5 Bundles   |   125 |   $300.00 |   $2.40   |
|   10 Bundles  |   250 |   $525.00 |   $2.10   |

Yuck.

Answer 1

If I have a table like this:

I would do it with the following steps:

1. Add the header separators from a new row using a bunch of -, making sure that there is more than than less:

   

2. Insert additional columns to contain the column separators, then select the cells that will have the separators. Insert the separator and then, instead of pressing Enter, I would press Ctrl+Enter to fill all the selected cells at the same time:

   

3. Format everything to the font Courier New, adjust the alignments and column widths:

   

4. Save as Formatted Text:

   

This will look like this if you open the file in notepad: