Excel to PDF
Turn .xlsx sheets into a readable, printable table.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
A spreadsheet has no pages, no margins and frequently no sensible width, so converting one is a series of choices rather than a straight translation. This reads the .xlsx directly, resolves what each cell actually displays, and sets the sheets as tables on paper you pick. The defaults are landscape, fit to width, and the header row repeated after every page break.
Use it when a sheet has to be read rather than worked in: a price list going to a client, a timesheet attached to an invoice, an export from an accounting system that somebody needs on paper, or a table you want to hand over in a form that will not be quietly edited.
How it works
- Drop your .xlsx files onto this page. Every sheet in each workbook is converted.
- Leave the orientation on landscape unless your sheet is unusually narrow - most are wider than they are tall.
- Keep fit to width on so the table is set at 9 point and the columns cross the page instead of running off it.
- Decide whether to draw grid lines, and whether each sheet's name should be printed as a heading above it.
- Raise the column limit under advanced options if your sheet is wider than 20 columns and you want all of them.
- Press Convert and the PDF downloads.
Dates are what spreadsheet converters get wrong most often. A date in a .xlsx is a plain number with a number-format attached to it; read the number without resolving the format and every date in the document turns into a five-digit integer. The format is resolved here, in the reader, before anything reaches the layout - which is why 45000 arrives as a date and not as forty-five thousand.
Formulas are read as their last calculated value rather than as formulas, which is almost always what a printed table should show and is also the only honest option: evaluating a workbook's dependency graph would mean implementing Excel's function library. The consequence worth knowing is that a workbook saved without recalculating carries stale values, and the PDF will faithfully reproduce them.
The column ceiling exists so the tool says something rather than shrinks. A sheet forty columns wide, scaled until all forty fit across A4, produces four-point type that nobody can read - so 20 columns is the default and the remainder are left out visibly instead of being crushed in. Raise the limit to 50 if you need to, and think about A3 in landscape at the same time.
Fit to width sets the base type at 9 point instead of 11. That is the whole of what it does, and the bluntness is deliberate: a fixed size you can predict beats an automatic scale factor that comes out differently on every sheet, and 9 point fits roughly a fifth more columns across a page than 11 does.
Each sheet starts on a fresh page by default, and its name becomes both a heading and a bookmark, so a twelve-sheet workbook arrives as a twelve-entry outline. Switch to run on under advanced options and the break between sheets is removed, which is worth doing when the sheets are short enough that each would otherwise waste most of a page.
What this tool cannot do
- Charts, sparklines and other drawings on a sheet are not converted. Only cell values and the table structure come across.
- Cell formatting is reduced to the table's own structure. Fill colours, custom borders and conditional formatting are not reproduced.
- Columns beyond the limit - 20 by default, 50 at most - are left out rather than the type being shrunk until everything fits.
Questions people ask
- My spreadsheet is wider than the page. What happens?
- The first 20 columns are converted and the rest are left out. You can take that limit to 50 under advanced options, but try landscape with fit to width on first, and consider A3 - a sheet that genuinely needs 40 columns needs paper, not a smaller font. Columns past the limit are reported rather than dropped in silence.
- Do my charts come across?
- No. A chart in a .xlsx is a drawing described in its own XML dialect and rendered by Excel at display time, so reproducing one means implementing Excel's chart renderer. Cell values, their displayed formatting and the table structure are what convert. If the chart is the point, screenshot it and use Images to PDF, or export it from Excel and stamp it on afterwards.
- Will formulas be recalculated?
- No. Each cell's last calculated value is read from the file, which is the value Excel was showing when the workbook was saved. That is normally exactly what a printed table should contain. If a workbook was saved without recalculating, the PDF carries the same stale numbers the file does - open it, recalculate, save, and convert again.
- What happens to a workbook with several sheets?
- All of them are converted, in workbook order. By default each starts on a new page with its name as a heading and as an entry in the PDF outline. Switch the between sheets setting to run on under advanced options and those breaks are removed, so short sheets follow one another instead of each taking a page.
- Is my spreadsheet uploaded?
- No. The .xlsx is unzipped and read in a Web Worker in your browser, and the PDF is written there. That matters more for spreadsheets than for most files, because a workbook usually holds a good deal more than the table you meant to print. None of it goes anywhere, because none of the file does.