Excel to PDF
Convert Excel to PDF in your browser, keeping cell colours, borders, fonts, column widths, merged cells and the number formats that make dates and currency readable.
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Spreadsheets are usually wider than they are tall, so landscape is the default.
Scales the sheet down so no columns are cut off.
- ProcessingOn your device
- Uploaded to a serverNothing
- InternetNot needed
Don't take our word for it. Turn off your Wi‑Fi, then use this tool. It will work exactly the same, which is only possible because your file never goes anywhere.
Worth knowing
Your formatting is read from the file itself: fills, fonts, borders, alignment, column widths, row heights, merged cells, pictures placed on the sheet and — importantly — the number formats that make a cell read as a date, a percentage or a price. What is not reproduced is what a browser has no way to draw: charts, pivot tables and conditional formatting.
Pictures are placed against the cell they are anchored to, which is how Excel stores them. A picture anchored to a hidden or empty row has nowhere to sit, so it is put below the sheet rather than dropped.
Formulas are not recalculated. The value Excel last saved is what appears, which is the same thing Excel's own export does.
Only .xlsx works. The old .xls format is binary and predates 2007, and a .csv has no formatting to convert — re-save either as .xlsx first.
The mistake most converters make
Excel does not store a date. It stores the number 46251 and, separately, a format code saying to display that number as a date. It does not store 12.5% either — it stores 0.125 with a percentage format. The same is true of every price, every accounting figure in brackets, every value rounded to two decimal places on screen but held to fifteen underneath.
This is why a careless conversion produces a document full of five-digit integers where the dates used to be. The values were all read correctly; the half of the file that says what they mean was ignored. Reading the format codes is not a refinement — without them, the output is not a version of your spreadsheet at all.
What comes across
- Number formats: dates, times, currencies, percentages, fractions of a decimal place, and the bracketed or red styling that marks negatives.
- Fills and font colours, including theme colours with their tints — the palette that changes when you change a workbook's theme.
- Every border style and weight Excel offers, resolved per cell edge so a thick outline around a block survives intact.
- Column widths, row heights, merged ranges, wrapped text, indents and rotated headers.
- Alignment, including the default that quietly matters most: numbers and dates right-aligned, text left-aligned.
Text that does not fit its cell
Excel has a specific rule here that is worth reproducing exactly. A long label spills over into the cell to its right when that cell is empty, and is clipped at the boundary when it is not. Both alternatives are worse: wrapping everything makes rows balloon and stops the sheet looking like a sheet, and clipping everything silently hides data. So the rule is applied cell by cell, the way Excel applies it.
Fitting a wide sheet onto paper
Spreadsheets grow sideways in a way documents do not, so landscape is the default here and fitting to the page width is on. Scaling has a floor, though. Past roughly a third of full size, text stops being legible, and a page that technically contains every column but cannot be read is no more useful than one with columns missing. At that point the sheet is left as it is and the note says so, because the honest fix is a bigger page, fewer columns, or splitting the sheet — not smaller type.
What is left out, and why
Charts do not appear. A chart in a .xlsx is not a picture — it is a description of series pointing at cell ranges, plus styling, and drawing it means reimplementing Excel's chart engine. Something that looks approximately right but plots subtly wrong is worse than an honest omission. The same goes for pivot tables and conditional formatting rules, which are recalculated by Excel rather than stored as appearance.
Formulas are not recalculated either. What you get is the value Excel last saved — which is exactly what Excel's own PDF export does, since a saved workbook already carries the result of every formula in it.
Going the other way is a different and harder problem: see extracting a table from a PDF back into a spreadsheet. If a wide sheet keeps breaking across pages, there are four fixes worth trying in order. And if you only need the PDF smaller afterwards, compressing it is the next step.
The workbook is unzipped and rendered in this tab and never sent anywhere — worth knowing when the sheet is a payroll run or a client list. More on why that matters.
Questions people ask
Does my cell formatting survive?
Yes. A .xlsx states its own appearance and all of it is read out: fills and font colours including theme colours with their tints, bold and italic, every border style and weight, horizontal and vertical alignment, wrapped text, indents, rotated headers, column widths, row heights and merged ranges. Number formats matter most of all, because Excel does not store a date — it stores a number like 46251 and a format code that says to show it as a date. Ignore the format codes and a readable sheet turns into a wall of meaningless integers.
My sheet is wider than the page.
Fit to page width is on by default and scales the sheet down so no columns are lost. Landscape is also the default, because spreadsheets are usually wider than they are tall. There is a limit: past about a third of full size the text stops being readable, so rather than shrink further the sheet is left at that size and the note tells you it will run past the edge. A larger page size, or hiding columns you do not need before converting, fixes it properly.
What about charts?
They will not appear. A chart in a .xlsx is a description of a chart — a set of series pointing at cell ranges — not a picture, so drawing one means reimplementing Excel's chart engine. Rather than render something that looks approximately right and is subtly wrong, they are left out. If you need the chart, copy it into the sheet as a picture in Excel first, or print that sheet from Excel directly.
Are gridlines included?
By default it follows the sheet: if gridlines are showing in Excel, they are drawn. You can force them on or off. Worth knowing that Excel's own printing default is the opposite — it hides gridlines when printing unless you turn them on — so this deliberately differs from what Excel would give you, because a table without lines is usually harder to read on paper.
Do hidden rows and sheets appear?
No. Hidden rows, hidden columns and hidden sheets are left out, on the assumption that they were hidden on purpose. Each visible sheet starts on a new page, with its name above it when there is more than one.
Is my spreadsheet uploaded?
No. The .xlsx is unzipped and rendered inside your browser and the PDF is written there too. Nothing leaves the device.
How to use it
How-to guides · 14 August 2026 · 6 min
Excel to PDF: how to stop it splitting across pages
Turning a spreadsheet into a PDF usually goes wrong in one specific way: the columns spill onto extra pages. Here's why, and the four fixes in the order worth trying.
How-to guides · 13 August 2026 · 7 min
How to convert a PDF to Excel without retyping it
Get a table out of a PDF and into a spreadsheet you can actually calculate with — in your browser, no upload. Plus how to spot the mistakes a converter makes.