Remove Macros from Excel (XLSM to XLSX)

The only difference between the two formats is permission to run code

An .xlsm file is an .xlsx file with one extra piece inside it: a VBA project. Everything else — the sheets, the formulas, the charts, the formatting — is stored identically. That single difference is why the two extensions exist at all: it lets a mail server, an upload form or a security policy decide whether a workbook is allowed to execute code without having to open it and look.

Which means converting between them is not really a conversion. It is a removal. And because .xlsx has nowhere to store macro code, a workbook that has genuinely been converted cannot be carrying any.

Why your spreadsheet comes back unchanged

Most converters would open the workbook in a spreadsheet engine and save it again as .xlsx. That produces a macro-free file, but it also rewrites every sheet along the way, and complex workbooks do not survive the round trip cleanly: pivot table configuration gets simplified, conditional formatting rules shift, chart styling changes, slicers break. A financial model is exactly the kind of file people need to de-macro, and exactly the kind that suffers most.

This tool takes the workbook apart, removes the macro pieces, and puts every remaining piece back byte for byte. Nothing is re-rendered because nothing needs to be. Your formulas are the same formulas, your pivot tables have the same configuration, your styles are the same styles — they are the identical bytes that went in. The side benefit is speed: the job takes milliseconds regardless of how complicated the spreadsheet is.

Two kinds of macro, and the one that gets missed

VBA is the macro system people know about, and it lives in a single part of the file that is easy to find and delete. But Excel also still runs Excel 4.0 macros, a system from 1992 that stores its code in what looks like an ordinary worksheet listed alongside your real ones. A converter that deletes the VBA project and stops there hands back a file it calls macro-free that still contains working macro code — and attackers have relied on precisely that.

Both kinds are removed here. Removing an Excel 4.0 sheet also means repairing the workbook’s sheet list, or Excel finds an entry pointing at a sheet that no longer exists and declares the file damaged. And because a security claim is worth nothing unless it is checked, the finished workbook is re-inspected from scratch before you get it: if any macro part, macro marking or macro reference is still reachable, the conversion fails and returns an error instead of a file. A missed edit becomes a refusal, never a false assurance.

Word and PowerPoint work the same way

The same macro-enabled split exists across Office, and the same reasoning applies: use DOCM to DOCX for Word documents and PPTM to PPTX for presentations. If you need to automate this across a large archive, all three are available on the API — this one at /api/convert/xlsm-to-xlsx.