CSV to PDF

How to turn a spreadsheet export into a PDF

A CSV is what every spreadsheet, bank, shop and database gives you when you ask for your data. It is rows of values and nothing else, so opening one shows a wall of commas. Set as a table on a page it becomes something you can read, print, attach to an email or hand to somebody.

1. Export or save your sheet as CSV, which every spreadsheet program does under Save as or Export.
2. Drop the file here, or paste the rows into the box.
3. Check the row and column count it reports.
4. Press Make the PDF, look at the first page, and save it.

Quotes, commas and separators

A value wrapped in double quotes may contain commas and line breaks of its own, and two quotes inside it mean one quote. That is the rule every spreadsheet follows when it writes a CSV, and it is followed here - which matters, because splitting naively on commas tears apart every address in the file.

Commas, semicolons and tabs are all recognised. Which one your file uses is worked out from its first line and reported back to you, because a European export separated by semicolons opened as if it were commas gives you one very long column.

CSV or .xlsx

If what you still have is the Excel file, use Excel to PDF instead. It reads the workbook itself: every sheet, the number formats, and the dates as dates rather than as the five-digit numbers they are stored as.

A CSV cannot carry any of that. It is rows of values and nothing else - no sheets, no formulas, no formats, nothing anywhere in the file saying that this column is money and that one is a day in March. That is its virtue as much as its limit: what you see in it is all there is in it.

So the rule is short. Still have the spreadsheet? Convert the spreadsheet. Only have the export - from a bank, a shop, a database, some system that hands you a file and no choice about it - then this is the tool, and you lose nothing by using it, because there was nothing more in the file to lose.

Wide sheets

A page is only so wide. Up to about eight columns reads well. Beyond that the table is set narrow and gets hard to read, and you are told so before you make it. A sheet with twenty columns is usually better printed from the spreadsheet program itself, sideways, where it can scale the page.