Excel to PDF

How to turn a spreadsheet into a PDF

Drop the file in. Every sheet is read, the values are worked out in your browser, and you are shown what was found before anything is made. The first page appears before you save, so you can see what you are getting.

1. Drop the .xlsx file on the box above. It is not uploaded.
2. Read what was found: how many sheets, rows and columns.
3. Press Make the PDF. A wide spreadsheet turns the page on its side by itself.
4. Look at the first page, then save it.

Why the dates are the whole problem

A date in a spreadsheet is not a date. It is a number - the count of days since the end of 1899 - with a format hung off it telling Excel to show it as a day. The first of January 2024 is the number 45292.

So a converter that reads the values and ignores the formats gives you back a column of five-digit numbers where your dates were. The same is true of times, which are fractions of a day, and of percentages, which are stored as 0.15 and shown as 15%. That kind of mistake is worse than a failure, because the page looks finished.

This tool reads the formats. Dates come out as dates, times as times, percentages as percentages. It also carries the odd historical detail that makes them line up: spreadsheets believe 1900 was a leap year, because Lotus 1-2-3 did and Excel copied the mistake deliberately so its files would open in Lotus. Forty years later everybody is still counting from the 30th of December 1899 to keep that error in place, and so are we.

What is carried over, and what is not

What comes over: every visible sheet, its name as a heading, all the text and numbers, dates, times, percentages, the thousands separator, true and false, and error values like #DIV/0! shown as Excel shows them. The first row of each sheet is set in bold, and the columns are sized by what is actually in them rather than all made equal, so a column of dates does not get the same width as a column of notes.

What does not: charts, pictures, cell colours, borders, conditional formatting, comments, frozen panes and anything else that is about how the sheet looks rather than what it says. Merged cells are read as their contents, not drawn merged. Hidden sheets are left out, on the grounds that they were hidden on purpose.

Formulas are not calculated again. Excel saves the answer it last worked out beside each formula, and that saved answer is what is shown - which is what every other converter does, and is right unless the file was written by something that never calculated it.

When a spreadsheet should not be a PDF

A table with twenty columns cannot be read on a sheet of paper, and no tool can change that. The page is turned on its side and the columns are sized by their contents, which buys a good deal, but past about fifteen columns you are printing something nobody can use.

When that is the case, the spreadsheet itself is the better tool: it can print a chosen range, repeat the heading row on each page, scale to fit the width and set the page up sideways with margins of your choosing. This tool is for the common thing - a sheet of figures somebody needs as a document, to attach, to sign off or to file - not for replacing a print dialog built over thirty years.

Very long sheets are cut at two thousand rows a sheet, and you are told by how much. That is not a limit of the reading; it is the point past which the PDF is no longer a document anybody opens.