Convert an Excel workbook to PDF
Render .xlsx sheets to a clean paginated PDF table with repeated headers, fit-to-width columns and landscape support. Runs offline in your browser.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
What this produces
A clean, paginated table rendered from your workbook's values — not a screenshot of Excel and not an attempt to reproduce its styling. Columns are measured from the actual cell contents, the first row can be repeated as a header on every page, and long cells wrap rather than being cut off.
That is the right output for the usual reason people convert a spreadsheet: sending a table to somebody who should be able to read it but not edit it, or attaching it to something that only accepts PDFs.
What it deliberately does not reproduce
| Feature | Here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cell fills, fonts, borders | Not carried over | A faithful style engine is a spreadsheet application. Print to PDF from Excel if you need the exact look |
| Charts and images | Not included | They are drawing objects, not cell data |
| Formulas | Cached results only | Nothing is recalculated — you get what the file stores |
| Merged cells | Value in the top-left cell, blanks elsewhere | That is how the merge is stored |
| Print areas and page breaks | Ignored | Pagination is driven by row height and paper size |
| Hidden rows and columns | Included | Check for them before sharing anything sensitive |
Cached values, and why that is the honest answer
An .xlsx file stores two things for every formula cell: the formula itself and the value
Excel last computed for it. This tool prints the stored value. It does not evaluate
VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS or anything else.
Almost always that is exactly what you want, because it is what the workbook says today. The one case where it bites is a file that was written by a script or an export library that omitted the cached values — those cells will be blank. If you see unexpected blanks, open the workbook in Excel or LibreOffice once, save it, and convert again.
Making a wide table fit
Try these in order:
- Leave fit-to-width on. Column widths are measured from the content, then scaled proportionally so the whole table lands inside the margins. Nothing is ever cut off at the page edge.
- Switch to landscape. An A4 page goes from 523 to 770 usable points, a 47 per cent gain.
- Drop the font size. The slider goes down to 5 pt. At 6 pt a table is still readable on paper and comfortably so on screen.
- Move to A3. Roughly double A4 by area, and most office printers will shrink it back to A4 on the way out if needed.
- Delete columns you are not sending. Almost always the real answer.
A single very wide column cannot squeeze the others into nothing — each column is capped at 45 per cent of the usable width before scaling, so a free-text notes field wraps instead of crushing everything beside it.
Fonts, and the character limitation
Every PDF reader ships the same fourteen standard fonts, so a document using them needs no embedded font data and stays tiny. Those fonts are WinAnsi-encoded, which covers Western European alphabets — English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Nordic and Portuguese included.
Anything else — Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese, Japanese, Korean — has no glyph in those fonts. Rendering it would mean embedding a Unicode font, and the only way to obtain one at runtime is to fetch it from a server, which this site does not do under any circumstances. Unsupported characters are therefore replaced with a question mark and the exact number of replacements is reported with the result, so you find out immediately rather than after sending it.
Multiple sheets
Workbooks with several sheets get a picker. Choose one, or take all of them — with "all sheets" each table is preceded by its sheet name in bold, and each starts on the page where the previous one ended rather than forcing a page break, which keeps small lookup tables from wasting a page each.
Sheets with no rows are skipped entirely rather than producing an empty page.
Related conversions
- CSV to PDF — the same renderer, fed by a plain text file.
- Excel to CSV — when the destination is a script.
- PDF to Excel — the reverse trip, by column clustering.
- Compress PDF — if the resulting document needs to be smaller.
Questions
Are formulas recalculated?
No. The values printed are the cached results Excel stored the last time the workbook was saved, which is what the file actually contains. Nothing is re-evaluated, so a workbook full of volatile functions prints exactly as it was last seen.
Does it keep my cell colours and fonts?
No — this is a clean table render, not a pixel-accurate reproduction of the workbook. You get column widths, a repeated header row, optional zebra striping and grid lines. If you need the exact styling, print to PDF from Excel itself.
My table is very wide. What are my options?
Switch to landscape, move to A3, drop the font size, or leave fit-to-width on — it scales every column proportionally so the whole table lands inside the margins rather than being cut off at the page edge.
Can I export only one worksheet?
Yes. When a workbook has several sheets you get a picker; choose one sheet or all of them. With all sheets, each one starts with its name printed above the table.
Which characters might not survive?
Anything outside the Western European (WinAnsi) range. PDF readers all ship the same fourteen standard fonts, and we will not fetch a font from a remote server, so Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and CJK text is replaced with a question mark — and the count is reported, never hidden.