Excel to PDF
Set a workbook on paper, a table to a sheet, with its headings on every page.
Drop files here
Or paste them, or pick them from this device. Nothing is uploaded: the work happens in this tab.
Files in this tab
Nothing is loaded yet.
Options
What the PDF will be called.
A multiple of the text size. 1.4 is what a book uses.
Even word spacing; an uneven right edge.
Helvetica.
Advanced
A TrueType or OpenType font to set the text in. Needed for anything the built-in typefaces cannot draw — Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese. The file is read here, in this tab, and embedded in the PDF.
Make the PDF
Add a file to get started.
What this does
This sets a workbook on paper as tables — one table per sheet, headed by the name on its tab, each starting on a new page and repeating its heading row at the top of every page it runs onto. A table too wide for the paper has its columns squeezed to fit rather than running off the edge, which is usually a reason to choose landscape.
What it will not do
Every tool here says what it cannot do, in its own words, before you rely on it.
- Every sheet becomes a table, headed by the name on its tab, and starts on a new page. Print areas, page-break previews, frozen panes and the scaling set in Excel are not read.
- A cell is set as the text the workbook stored. A number formatted as a date, a currency or a percentage is set as the number underneath it, because the format is a rule Excel applies and not a value in the file.
- Formulas are not calculated. The value the workbook last saved is what is set; a formula never calculated is blank.
- Charts, pictures, shapes, conditional formatting, cell colours and borders are not read.
- A `.xls` from before 2007 is a different format altogether and cannot be read. Save it as `.xlsx` first.
- A table wider than the page has its columns squeezed together to fit rather than running off the edge, so a very wide table is more readable on landscape paper, or at a smaller text size.
- A cell holding more than will fit its column wraps inside it, which makes the row taller rather than the column wider.
- Text is set in the standard fonts every reader already carries, so the file renders identically on a machine that has none of your fonts installed. Anything they cannot draw needs a font file, which is embedded and subsetted into the PDF with it.
- A font file you supply is used for everything: bold, italic and monospaced text are all drawn in that one face rather than in a bold, italic or fixed-width cut of it. Code blocks and columns of figures lose their alignment as a result, so supply one only when the built-in fonts cannot draw your text.
- Shaping and joining come from the font itself, and nothing reorders a line: text is drawn in the order it is given, so a line mixing right-to-left and left-to-right writing comes out in that order rather than in reading order.
Questions people ask
My dates came out as numbers.
A date in a spreadsheet is a number with a display rule attached, and the rule is Excel’s rather than part of the value. What is set is the number the workbook stored.
Are my formulas calculated?
No. The value the workbook last saved is what is set. A formula that was never calculated has no value, and comes out blank.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The work happens in this browser tab, on your own machine. There is no server in this product to send a file to, which is why the promise is checkable rather than something you have to take on trust: open your browser's network panel and watch it do the work without making a request.
Is there a size limit, or a limit on how many files?
None that we impose. The limit is your own machine's memory, because that is where the work happens — a few hundred megabytes is comfortable on a laptop, and less on a phone. There is no daily task counter, no queue and no account.
What does it cost, and what is the catch?
Nothing, and there is no paid tier that unlocks features: the whole product is the free one. That is affordable because running it costs us nothing — your computer does the work — so there is no per-file cost to recover, no advertising and no data to sell.