Excel to PDF

Check for hidden sheets first

Start here, because it is the one thing that can genuinely embarrass you and no other tool in this category mentions it.

Every sheet in the workbook is converted, including hidden ones. Hidden sheets are extremely common in real spreadsheets — the working calculations behind a summary, an old version someone tucked away, a list of costs behind a customer-facing price sheet, the raw export feeding a dashboard. They are hidden in Excel and they are not hidden here.

So before you convert something you are sending out: right-click any sheet tab in Excel and choose Unhide to see what is there. If a sheet should not be in the PDF, delete it from a copy of the workbook and convert that copy. Thirty seconds, and it is the difference between sending a price list and sending your margins.

What survives, and what does not

The data survives completely — every value, in the right cell, in a proper bordered table, with your sheet names as headings when there is more than one sheet. For a spreadsheet, that is usually the whole point of the PDF.

The formatting does not. Cell colours, fonts, number formats and currency symbols, merged cells, column widths, conditional formatting, charts, images, frozen panes and filters are all dropped. What you get is a neutral, legible table rather than a picture of your workbook.

That is fine — often better — when the PDF exists so someone can read the numbers without editing them. It is not what you want if the formatting carries meaning: a colour-coded status column, a chart that is the actual deliverable, a carefully laid out invoice template. For those, use Excel's own Export as PDF, which renders the workbook as it looks.

One thing people worry about unnecessarily: formulas come through as their calculated values. That is correct behaviour for a PDF — you want the number, not =SUM(B2:B40) — and it means the recipient sees exactly what you saw.

Fit to page, and wide sheets

This is the setting that decides whether the PDF is usable.

Fit to page squeezes the table to the page width and drops the type a little, so every column is visible. Leave it on for anything more than about six or seven columns.

Turn it off and columns keep their natural widths — which reads better for a narrow table, and silently cuts off the right-hand columns on a wide one, because a printed page cannot scroll. If columns are missing from your PDF, that is the cause.

For a genuinely wide sheet, the combination that works is landscape plus fit to page. Beyond about fifteen columns, consider whether the sheet should be a PDF at all, or whether the recipient needs the spreadsheet.

Rows stay whole across page breaks

A small detail worth knowing about, because it is the thing that makes long tables readable. The print styling prevents a row from splitting across a page boundary, so you never get the first half of a row at the bottom of page two and the rest at the top of page three. Long tables paginate cleanly and stay scannable.

Bold headers are on by default, which puts the first row in a shaded header style. Turn it off if your first row is data rather than a header — otherwise your first record will be formatted as a heading.

How the PDF is actually produced

Worth explaining so nothing is surprising. The spreadsheet is read and laid out in your browser, then a new window opens with the finished tables and the print dialog appears. Choose Save as PDF as the destination and pick where to put it.

Two consequences. Your browser needs to allow popups for this site, or the window cannot open — if nothing happens, that is why. And the page size and margins come from that dialog, so you can adjust them there as well.

The upside of this route is that nothing leaves your machine. A spreadsheet is the most sensitive ordinary business file there is — payroll, customer lists, pricing, financial models — and uploading one to a free converter means handing that table to whoever runs it.

Related tools

Excel to CSV Converter extracts the data as plain CSV when the recipient needs to work with it rather than read it. CSV to Excel Converter goes the other way, and Word to PDF handles documents through the same print-to-PDF route.