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Excel to PDF

A price list to send, a report to sign, a schedule to print — a PDF is what people open without asking which program they need. Here the workbook is read inside this tab and the table is typeset into a PDF on your own machine.

or drop them here

A workbook in XLSX — the format Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets save. Up to 25 MB

    The workbook stays on this device: it is read inside the tab and nothing is uploaded. The PDF gets real text — you can select it, search it and copy it, unlike a picture of a table.

    What does not carry over: colours, merged cells and pictures. Formulas come across as the values Excel saved, dates as year-month-day.

    Nearby: PDF to Excel · Word to PDF · Merge PDF · Compress PDF

    How to use

    1. Choose an XLSX workbook — the format Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets save.
    2. Pick a sheet if the workbook has several, and choose upright or sideways pages (or let the tool fit them).
    3. Press “Make the PDF” and download the file.

    Good to know

    Real text, not a picture of a table

    The simplest way to make a PDF out of a spreadsheet is to draw the table as an image. It looks identical and it is half the work — but such a file cannot be searched, selected or copied, and half the point of a document is gone. So here the table is set as text. The price of that is a font: the fourteen standard PDF fonts only know Latin, and on Cyrillic they quietly write question marks instead of failing. This page loads a trimmed font and a font parser, about 195 KB together, once, and only when you press the button.

    What the layout decides for you

    Columns get the width their content needs, but no single column takes more than a third of the page — otherwise one long comment squeezes out the whole table. What still does not fit is wrapped, never cut with an ellipsis: in a table of numbers, trimming is data loss dressed up as tidiness. The header row repeats on every page, because a table on eight sheets without column names is unreadable. Page orientation is chosen by whether the table actually fits, not by counting columns.

    Where the workbook stays

    In this tab. XLSX is a zip of XML files; it is unpacked and read by the browser, and nothing is sent anywhere. That also explains what is not carried over: colours, merged cells and pictures stay behind, because the goal is a readable table, not a copy of the workbook. Formulas come across as the value Excel saved with them, and dates as year-month-day — the one form that reads the same in every language.

    Frequently asked questions

    Is my workbook uploaded anywhere?

    No. The file is read inside this browser tab and the PDF is built there too. Nothing leaves your computer unless you send it somewhere yourself.

    Can I select and search the text in the PDF?

    Yes — that is the reason this tool exists. Open the result and try a search: the words are really there, because the table is set as text rather than drawn as a picture.

    Why do Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters not appear?

    The built-in font covers Latin, Cyrillic and the usual signs and weighs 49 KB. A font for those scripts weighs three to seven megabytes, and downloading that quietly would not be fair. If such characters are in your sheet, the page says so before you press the button.

    What happens to formulas and dates?

    A formula comes across as the value Excel saved with it — the result you saw in the cell. Dates are written as year-month-day; that form is unambiguous, while 03/04 means two different days on two sides of the ocean.

    Can I convert an old .xls file or a CSV?

    Not here. The old .xls is a completely different file layout — open it in Excel and save as .xlsx. For CSV, the same: save it as a workbook first.

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