Is my spreadsheet uploaded anywhere?
No. An .xlsx is a ZIP; it is opened in this browser tab, its cells are read there, and the PDF is written there. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no server to send it to.
Excel to PDF
A sheet you can actually read.
Result
0
pages
What this tool does, exactly
Choose a spreadsheet. Its cells are read on this device and set onto the page as real, selectable text — with the header row reprinted at the top of every page, and columns too wide for the paper continued on a further page rather than squeezed until nothing is legible.
- The header comes with every page
- A sheet of two hundred rows becomes several pages, and on every page after the first a printout without its header is a grid of anonymous numbers. The first row is reprinted at the top of each page, which is the single thing that decides whether the printout can be read.
- Wide sheets are continued, not squeezed
- Thirty columns forced onto one page width gives thirty columns one character wide. Columns that do not fit are carried onto a further page instead, and the first column is repeated at the front of each band so every page still says which row is which.
- It picks portrait or landscape for you
- Almost nobody knows in advance whether their sheet fits the width of a page, and finding out costs a wasted conversion. The tool measures the widest sheet and turns the paper sideways when that is what it takes. You can still choose for yourself.
- What it does not do
- Reproduce your spreadsheet's appearance. Cell colours, fonts, borders, merged cells and conditional formatting are this tool's typesetting rather than yours, and charts, images and pivot tables are not drawn. A formula is printed as the value your spreadsheet last saved for it, which is what a printout has always shown.
- Letters the format cannot carry
- PDF's built-in fonts cannot encode Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek or emoji. Rather than refuse those workbooks or set them as rubbish, the tool draws those cells with your own browser's font and places them as pictures. They look right and print right; they are not selectable text, and the result says how many cells that happened to.
- Which files
- .xlsx as saved by Excel, LibreOffice or Numbers, and CSV or TSV tables. An .xls from Excel 97-2003 is a different format and is refused by name rather than half-read — save it as .xlsx first.
About this tool
Why does the PDF not look like my spreadsheet?
Because it is set again rather than photographed. Your spreadsheet's colours, fonts, borders and merged cells depend on the application that made them, none of which exists here. What survives is every value, in its column, as selectable and searchable text — which is what a printout is for. When the exact appearance matters more than the contents, print to PDF from Excel itself.
My sheet is very wide. What happens to it?
It is turned sideways if that is enough, and continued onto further pages if it is not. Each continued page repeats the first column, so a band of figures always sits beside the label that names its row. Nothing is dropped to make it fit.
Are my numbers still numbers?
They are printed as text, and lined up to the right the way a column of quantities should be. The alignment is judged on the body of the column rather than its heading, and deliberately meanly: a date, a phone number, a part code and a range all begin with a digit and none of them is a quantity, so none of them is treated as one.
How big a spreadsheet can it print?
Large ones, but not unlimited ones — a sheet can hold a million rows and a PDF of a million rows is not something anybody reads. Past this tool's limit the printout stops, and the result says exactly how many rows were not printed rather than quietly handing you a short file.