Excel to PDF

This is the part every converter glosses over. Excel does not store pages — it stores a grid — and turning a grid into pages is a series of decisions. That is why Excel itself asks you about print areas, scaling, page order and repeated header rows before it will print.

Here those decisions are made the predictable way: every row, in order, in equal-width columns, each cell wrapped rather than cropped. Sheets start on a new page and are labelled. Nothing is cut off, and nothing is silently dropped.

What does not come across: colours, fonts, borders, cell shading, conditional formatting, merged cells, frozen panes, charts, images and comments. Those are presentation, and reproducing them means reimplementing Excel's renderer. What you get is the content, set out as a readable table.

A workbook stores two things for every calculated cell: the formula, and the value Excel last worked out for it. The PDF gets the value, because a PDF has nowhere to put a formula.

Almost always that is what you want. The exception is a workbook edited by something that did not recalculate before saving — some export tools, and some scripts — where the stored value can be stale. If a number looks wrong, open the file in Excel, let it recalculate, and save again.

Dates come across as they are formatted in the sheet, not as the underlying serial numbers, so a cell showing 2024-03-01 does not become 45352.

Columns are given equal width, so a fifteen-column sheet gets fifteen narrow columns rather than three readable ones and twelve off the edge of the paper. Every cell wraps inside its column.

For anything wider than about eight columns, switch the orientation to landscape and drop the body size to eight or nine points. Both are in the options, and the result tells you when a sheet is wide enough for that to be worth doing.

Leaving the sheet box as all converts every sheet, each starting on a new page. Naming one — exactly as it appears on the tab in Excel — converts only that one.

Rows that are entirely empty are skipped. In a spreadsheet a blank row is spacing; on a page it is an empty ruled line that reads as a mistake.

PDF has fourteen built-in fonts that every reader already has, and they cover WinAnsi — Latin letters, accented European characters, curly quotes, the euro and pound signs. Nothing else.

Writing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Devanagari or Cyrillic means embedding a font that contains those glyphs, and a font with usable CJK coverage is several megabytes. Downloading that on the chance a visitor needs it is not a reasonable trade for a page that mostly converts English.

So instead of producing a document full of blank boxes, unencodable characters become a question mark and the conversion tells you exactly how many were affected and which script they belonged to. If your text is in one of those scripts, this is the wrong tool and you should use a desktop converter — that is a more useful answer than a broken file.

Spreadsheets are where organisations keep the things they would least like to hand over: payroll, pricing, customer lists, patient records, financial models, exam marks.

A free converter that takes an upload receives all of it — every sheet, including the ones you forgot were in the file, and every hidden column. Nothing here is transmitted. Turn your Wi-Fi off first if you want to be sure.