Convert XLSX to PDF

Because a spreadsheet is a working file and the thing being sent is finished. An invoice, a quotation, a set of accounts — none of them should recalculate on somebody else’s machine or be editable by the recipient.

A workbook opened elsewhere also shows their column widths, their fonts and their idea of what a date looks like. A PDF shows what you saw, to everybody.

A sheet is an unbounded grid — it extends as far right as anyone keeps typing. A PDF is made of sheets of paper with fixed edges. Somewhere between the two, something has to decide where a page ends, and that decision is stored in the workbook rather than made by the converter.

The print area, the orientation, the scaling and the repeated header rows are all settings in the file, and the conversion follows them exactly. A workbook that was never set up for printing converts as a workbook that was never set up for printing: columns spilling onto pages of their own, a table sliced down the middle, and page eleven with no idea what its columns mean.

Switch the orientation to landscape if the table is wider than it is tall. Set the print area to exactly the range that matters, which is the single most effective step and takes ten seconds. Choose "fit all columns on one page" in the scaling options so a slightly-too-wide table shrinks rather than splitting.

Then set the header row to repeat, so page four still has column titles, and check the print preview. The PDF will match that preview, because they are the same operation — which means every disappointment about the output is visible before the conversion rather than after.

This surprises people regularly and has a mundane cause: the sheet’s used range is much larger than the visible table. A value typed into a distant cell years ago and deleted, formatting applied to an entire column, or a paste that reached further than intended all extend the range, and the converter prints the range.

Setting an explicit print area is the fix, and it is worth doing rather than hunting for the stray cell. If you want the sheet itself cleaned up, deleting the unused rows and columns entirely — not just their contents — and saving is what actually shrinks the used range.

Every cell in the PDF shows what it held at the moment of conversion. The formulas are gone, along with links to other workbooks and any external references, so nothing recalculates and nothing depends on the recipient’s locale, decimal separator or time zone.

For an invoice or a set of accounts that is exactly right: the figures are a statement rather than a model. If the recipient genuinely needs to work with the numbers, send the workbook as well — but send the PDF too, because it is the version that records what you meant.

The conversion runs a full office engine with metric-compatible substitutes for the common Microsoft fonts. Metric-compatible means the replacement occupies the same space as the original, so column widths and line breaks land where they did rather than reflowing.

Spreadsheets are also more forgiving than documents here, because the cell grid holds the structure regardless of what happens inside it. The place to look afterwards is anything using an unusual font, and text that was already close to overflowing its cell.

Office formats need a real office engine, so unlike the image conversions on this site this one runs on a server. The workbook travels over an encrypted connection, is converted in an isolated environment with no route out to the internet, and the working files are deleted as soon as the job finishes.

The free limit is 25 megabytes, which a spreadsheet reaches only when somebody has pasted images into it. An ordinary workbook of numbers, however many rows, is a fraction of that.

CSV when a program is going to read it — an import routine, a database, an analysis tool. It streams, every system accepts it, and it cannot carry macros.

The workbook itself when the recipient has to sort or extend the data, since a PDF forces them to retype and they will. Send PDF when the numbers are a statement, and a spreadsheet when they are a starting point.