Excel to GEDCOM — a spreadsheet of relatives as a tree
Convert an Excel list of people into a GEDCOM (.ged) file that Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch and every genealogy program imports: names, dates, places, parents and spouses become a real tree.
About this conversion
Many family trees start as a spreadsheet: a row per person, a column for the birth date, another for the father. Here the sheet is read and turned into GEDCOM. Columns are recognised by their names — First name or Given, Surname or Last name, Sex, Born or Birth date, Birth place, Died, Death place, Father, Mother, Spouse, Notes — and parents and spouses can be given either by name or by an ID column. Dates in any common form, including Excel's own date cells, become standard GEDCOM dates. The result opens here as a tree to check before you save it as a .ged for import.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open the file and read it.
The same tree, other ways
The tree stays open after it is read, so the format is picked at the end: the same file can leave here as PDF, Word (.docx), CSV, HTML, TXT, JSON, PNG, JPG, XML or SVG. Before that you can walk through it person by person, print it as a chart or a book, find people who were entered twice, hide the living, and correct names and dates.
Questions
- What does the sheet need?
- A name column (or given name and surname) and at least one of birth date, death date, father, mother or spouse. The first row must be the column names.
- How are parents linked?
- By the Father ID and Mother ID columns if there is an ID column, otherwise by matching the full name in the Father and Mother columns to someone else in the sheet.