Excel to PDF
Excel to PDF for a workbook someone only needs to read: tick the sheets worth sending, choose A4 or US Letter, portrait or landscape, and each sheet lands as its own page of selectable text.
Drag & drop your file here, or
How to use
- Choose the .xlsx. A workbook holding more than one sheet unfolds a row of checkboxes, all ticked, so clear the working sheets you would rather nobody saw.
- Set page size and orientation, then press Convert to PDF. The status line moves from Reading to Generating PDF, and the file saves itself the moment the worker is done.
About this tool
Someone asks for the numbers and you already know they will never edit them. Excel to PDF is the move: pick an .xlsx, tick the sheets worth sending, and every one of them comes back as a table on its own page under a bold heading carrying the sheet name. The finished file holds real text rather than a picture of a grid. Ctrl+F finds a name in it, and a figure copies out clean.
The options show up once the workbook has been read. A4 or US Letter, portrait or landscape, and two checkboxes that both start ticked. First row is a header bolds row one, drops a pale grey fill behind it, and repeats that row at the top of every page a long table spills onto. Untick it when row one holds data rather than labels.
Fit columns to page width is the setting worth understanding. Leave it on and every column gets an identical slice of the paper, which on A4 portrait means 547 points shared out after the 24-point margins. Switch it off and each column sizes itself to whatever it holds, which reads better on a narrow table and pushes a wide one off the right edge.
Values arrive the way the file stores them. Body text is Roboto at 9 points, rows separated by thin horizontal rules with no vertical lines anywhere. A cell displaying 1,234.50 prints as 1234.5, because the display format lives in Excel and only the number underneath gets read. Dates are the bigger surprise: a column you set to 01/06/2026 comes out as the long date text your browser writes, time zone and all.
There are two ceilings. Each sheet prints at most 5,000 rows and 50 columns, and when a sheet runs past either one the PDF says so in italics under the table: Showing the first 5000 of 12000 rows. The download takes the workbook's own name, so budget-2026.xlsx saves as budget-2026.pdf.
Good to know
- Formulas print the value Excel cached the last time it saved, and nothing is recalculated here. A formula stored without a cached result comes out as an empty cell, and so does one whose cached result is zero, which is the case that catches people out. Open the workbook, save it again, and convert that copy.
- What lands in the PDF is your data and nothing else. Cell fills, conditional formatting, charts, pictures, comments: all of it stays behind. A merged block prints its text in every cell it used to span, so a title merged across six columns repeats six times.
Common questions
Why do my dates come out as a full timestamp?
Excel stores a date as a date and this tool prints it plainly, which gives you the long form your browser writes: weekday, month, day, year, clock time, time zone. The dd/mm/yyyy you see on screen is a display format that lives in the sheet, and the cell value never carries it. Where the printed string matters, add a helper column that turns the date into text with Excel's TEXT function and convert that instead.
Can I convert just one sheet out of the workbook?
That is what the checkbox row is for. Every sheet starts ticked, and unticking one keeps it out of the file entirely. The sheets you keep print in workbook order, each on a fresh page. For a single-sheet file the row is hidden, since there would be nothing to choose.
My table is cut off at the right edge. What fixes it?
Two things. Landscape gives you 842 points of A4 to work with instead of 595, and leaving Fit columns to page width ticked squeezes every column into what is left after the margins. A table still clipped after both has more than 50 columns, which is the hard ceiling per sheet.
Will it open an .xls or a .csv?
Neither one. The field takes .xlsx, the zipped format Excel has written since 2007, and a legacy .xls is a different container underneath. Open that in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets and save a copy as .xlsx. For a CSV, send it through the CSV to XLSX Converter first, or just read it in the CSV Viewer.
Does it follow the print area and page breaks I set in Excel?
It ignores all of that. Print areas, print titles and manual page breaks play no part, because the layout comes from the two dropdowns on this page. Worth knowing too: a row or column you hid in Excel still prints, since the reader walks the sheet's whole used range. Delete what you want gone, or leave that sheet unticked.
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