How to use Excel to PDF
- 1
Add the workbook
Drop an .xlsx, .xlsm or .csv file; its sheet list appears as soon as it has been read, hidden sheets included and marked.
- 2
Tick the sheets to print
Choose one tab or several, then set A4 or Letter, automatic, portrait or landscape orientation, and normal, narrow or no margins.
- 3
Decide how wide tables print
Leave Fit to page width on to shrink every column onto the page, or switch it off to continue columns on following pages. Gridlines and a repeated first row are one switch each.
- 4
Save the PDF
Page through the preview and download the file once the sheets look the way you want.
Limits and Pro
Free: workbooks up to 50 MB, any number of sheets, and up to 20,000 rows by 300 columns per sheet; bigger sheets are cut with a note in the preview.
Pro takes workbooks up to 4 GB; the per-sheet row and column cap is the same on both plans. See Pro
About Excel to PDF
Each selected sheet is printed from its used range, in the order of the workbook tabs. Values appear the way Excel displays them, because the cell's number format is applied to the stored value: currency symbols, percentages, thousands separators, leading zeros, and dates and times all keep their formatting. Fonts, bold and italic, text colors, fills, borders, alignment, wrapped text, merged cells, column widths and row heights are reproduced, hidden rows and columns stay hidden, and pictures anchored to cells, such as a logo on an invoice, land in their place.
Wide sheets are where spreadsheet PDFs usually go wrong. With Fit to page width on, the whole width shrinks onto one page, and a sheet too wide for portrait, or one saved as landscape in Excel, turns landscape automatically. With it off, columns continue on the next page at a column boundary, never through a cell, and long tables break between rows with the first row repeated if you ask for it.
Good uses: sending a price list, timetable or budget to someone without Excel, attaching figures to a proposal, or printing a CSV export from a bank or shop system; CSV files with commas, semicolons, tabs or pipes are detected automatically.
What it does not do: formulas are not recalculated — the PDF shows the results Excel last saved in the file — and charts, comments, sparklines and conditional-format icons are not drawn. Print areas and manual page breaks from Excel's Page Layout are replaced by the options chosen here.
Privacy
The workbook is unzipped and its cells are read and laid out inside this browser tab, then a worker on your device writes the PDF. Cell values, formulas and sheet names never leave your computer; only open-source font files are fetched while converting.
Features
Fit wide sheets
Shrink every column onto the paper, or let wide tables run across pages split cleanly at column edges.
Header row on each page
Long lists repeat their first row at the top of every printed page so columns stay labelled.
Excel's own number formats
Dates, currencies, percentages and custom formats are rendered from the stored values, matching what Excel shows.