Convert a spreadsheet to PDF

Converting a spreadsheet to PDF is usually about sending it to someone who should read the numbers but not edit them, or attaching it to something that has to stay fixed. The difficulty is that a spreadsheet has no pages. It is a grid that extends as far as it extends, and turning that into paper requires decisions the file does not contain.

Three of those decisions cause most of the bad output you have seen. How wide should each column be. Where should the page break. What happens when a row is wider than the paper. Get them wrong and you get the printed spreadsheet everyone recognises: the last two columns orphaned onto pages of their own, no header to say what any of the figures mean, and a row split down the middle.

This converter answers them explicitly. Columns are sized by the content they actually hold rather than divided equally, so an identifier column stays narrow and a description column gets the room it needs, with a cap so one long comment cannot starve everything else. The header row repeats at the top of every page, because a table whose header is only on page one becomes unreadable by page four. A sheet too wide for portrait turns itself landscape rather than being cut, and if even landscape cannot fit every column, the ones that could not fit are reported rather than silently dropped.

What does not carry over is the styling. Cell colours, borders, merged cells, conditional formatting, charts, and images are all left behind. Formulas convert to their current calculated values, which is what the workbook stores next to them. If your reason for converting is to preserve a formatted report exactly as designed, Excel’s own export preserves its own formatting better and this will not match it. If your reason is to hand someone a readable, fixed copy of the data, this is the shorter path.

Every sheet with data becomes its own section, titled and starting on a new page. Empty sheets are skipped rather than producing blank pages.

The conversion runs in your browser. Spreadsheets are, in practice, the file type most likely to hold customer records, payroll, pricing, or internal figures, which makes the usual habit of uploading one to a conversion service in order to change its format a particularly poor trade. The older .xls format is not supported: despite the similar name it is a different, binary format, so open it and save it as .xlsx first.