Convert CSV to PDF

CSV is not really a document format. It is the plainest possible way to hand a table from one program to another: values, commas, line breaks, no fonts, no column widths, no page. Which is exactly why it is everywhere — every database, accounting package and analytics tool will export one — and exactly why turning it into a PDF is less straightforward than it sounds.

The reason people want it anyway is usually that a human has to look at the thing. A report needs the underlying figures attached. A grant application wants the data as a document. Someone has asked for a printout. In all of those cases the recipient is going to read the table, not open it in a spreadsheet, and PDF is the format that reads the same everywhere.

This is the single most common disappointment. A CSV has no page width — a row can be five columns or eighty and the file does not care. A PDF page is a fixed size. So a wide export either gets scaled down until the text is too small to read, or runs off the edge and loses columns entirely.

If your table has more than about ten columns, the honest advice is to open it in a spreadsheet first, set the page to landscape, use scale-to-fit, and export the PDF from there. You will get a far better result than any automatic conversion can give you, and it takes a minute.

For a summary, a short list or a few columns of figures, this conversion does the job with no fuss. The rows are laid out as a table across as many pages as they need, with a readable default typeface, and the result is something you can attach to an email without apologising for it.

A CSV holds text, and the converter has to decide what each value means: is `007` the number seven or a product code? Is `03/04` a date, and in which order? Interpretation usually matches expectation, but identifiers with leading zeros are the classic casualty. If your table contains part numbers, postcodes or account references, check them in the output.

If the person receiving this is going to work with the data rather than read it, PDF is the wrong format and XLSX is the right one — it is one click away on this site, it keeps everything as data, and it runs in your browser. PDF is for when the table is being read, filed or printed.

This conversion runs on our server, because laying a table onto pages means running LibreOffice. The file is uploaded over an encrypted connection and deleted as soon as the job finishes. Converting a CSV to JSON, XLSX or TSV happens entirely in your browser with no upload at all.

A CSV has no types — every field is text until something decides otherwise — and the something is LibreOffice’s text import, which runs before anything is laid out. So the page shows the result of its decisions rather than the characters you wrote, and that is where the leading zeros described above go.

Those decisions are not adjustable from here: a conversion takes the import defaults and there is no control on this page to change them. Where the presentation matters as much as the content, convert the CSV to XLSX first, set the column formats there and print that. It is one extra step, and it is the only way to be sure a reference number reaches the document in the form it left the export.