A spreadsheet becomes a PDF when the numbers have to arrive exactly as you sent them: an invoice or price list for a client, a timesheet for payroll, a budget attached to a grant application, a table for a tender portal that only accepts PDF. The recipient needs no Excel, cannot overwrite a formula by accident and sees the same pages you saw in print preview. That last promise is where most conversions fail, because a worksheet has no pages until printing cuts it into them.
How the workbook is cut into pages
Our converter opens the XLSX on our own server in the Czech Republic and exports it to PDF. Nothing is invented on the way. The page setup saved in the file decides the result, exactly as if you pressed Print:
- Sheets: all visible sheets go into a single PDF in tab order. Hidden sheets are left out.
- Print areas set in Excel under Page Layout › Print Area are respected. A sheet without one prints its used range.
- Manual page breaks, orientation, paper size, margins, headers and footers, and rows repeated at the top of each page are carried over.
- Scaling such as "Fit All Columns on One Page" is applied.
- Rows hidden by a filter or by hand stay hidden.
Formulas turn into their displayed results, with your number formats and rounding. Charts are drawn as vector graphics, so they stay sharp when zoomed. Hyperlinks in cells remain clickable. Cell comments do not become PDF annotations, and macros, drop-down lists and slicers lose their function. A PDF is a printout, not a workbook.
"Excel to PDF only converts one sheet"
This is the most frequent complaint, and it has two different causes depending on the tool.
In our converter, once any sheet has a print area, sheets without a print area are skipped entirely. Excel prints such sheets whole, so a workbook that looks fine in Excel can lose sheets here. The fix takes a minute: clear the print area on the sheet that has one (Page Layout › Print Area › Clear Print Area), or define a print area on every sheet you want in the PDF.
Excel's own Save as PDF has the opposite trap: by default it publishes only the active sheet. Click Options and choose Entire workbook.
Wide sheets: columns end up on separate pages
A sheet wider than the paper is cut into vertical strips. By default the pages run down first and then across, so columns K to T of a long table appear only after all rows of columns A to J, perhaps on page 9 of 12. Nobody reads a table like that.
Fix it in the source file before converting:
- Page Layout › Orientation › Landscape.
- Page Layout › Scale to Fit: Width 1 page, Height Automatic. The table gets as many pages as it needs, but never more than one page wide.
- Page Layout › Print Titles › Rows to repeat at top, so the header row appears on every page.
Avoid "Fit Sheet on One Page" for long lists. Two thousand rows squeezed onto one A4 sheet give type no one can read. Check the paper size too: a workbook from the US, or a file generated by software that writes no page setup at all, can come out on US Letter instead of A4.
Fonts and "###" in the PDF
Excel stores font names, not the fonts themselves. Our server has metric-compatible replacements for the classic Office fonts: Carlito for Calibri, Caladea for Cambria, Liberation for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. Their characters have identical widths, so columns keep their fit. Aptos, which replaced Calibri as the Microsoft 365 default from 2023, Segoe UI and corporate fonts are not available and get substituted. If the substitute is slightly wider, a number that just filled its column no longer fits and the PDF shows ### instead. Widen the column a little or switch those cells to Calibri or Arial.
XLSX and PDF in brief
| XLSX | ||
|---|---|---|
| Standard | ECMA-376 (2006), ISO/IEC 29500 (2008) | ISO 32000-1 (2008), ISO 32000-2 (2017, revised 2020) |
| Content | cells, formulas and styles in zipped XML | fixed pages with text, vectors and images |
| Pages | none, only print settings | fixed and final |
| Meant for | calculating and editing | reading, sending, printing, archiving |
XLSX has been Excel's default format since Excel 2007. The Library of Congress format description explains that it is a ZIP package of SpreadsheetML files; rename a copy to .zip and you can look inside. The PDF we produce is a standard PDF, not the archival PDF/A variant. More about the target format on our PDF format page.
When Excel is easier, and when the converter helps
If you have Excel and the workbook uses unusual fonts, Excel's own export (File › Export › Create PDF/XPS on Windows) renders with the original fonts and is the most faithful option. Microsoft explains how to set or clear a print area.
The converter is useful when Excel is not at hand: on a Chromebook, Linux or a phone, on a borrowed computer, or for ten workbooks at once, each returned as its own PDF and downloadable together as a ZIP. Old binary .xls files work the same way, and if you want to keep editing them, convert XLS to XLSX first. The uploaded workbook is deleted right after conversion and the PDF after 14 days. For Word files there is DOCX to PDF.