Why your spreadsheet looks wrong as a PDF

You send a spreadsheet as a PDF and it arrives wrong. The last three columns have been cut off. A table has split across two pages, with the headings left behind on the first. Row 40 is on page two for no clear reason.

None of this is the converter being careless. It all comes from one fact that is easy to miss: a spreadsheet has no pages, and a PDF is nothing but pages. Everything below follows from that.

A spreadsheet is one infinite sheet

When you work in Excel, you are looking through a window at a grid with no end. It goes as far right and as far down as you need. There is no edge, and nothing in the file says where one page ends and the next begins, because there are no pages.

A PDF is the opposite: a fixed series of sheets, each of a fixed size. Nothing can go past the edge of one, because there is nowhere for it to go.

So converting means deciding where to cut. Those decisions are what you are unhappy with, and you can make almost all of them yourself in advance instead of leaving them to the converter.

The four things that go wrong

Columns cut off at the right

This is the most common one. Your sheet is fifteen columns wide, and an A4 page in portrait fits about eight. The rest are pushed onto their own pages, or dropped.

Three fixes, starting with the one that is most often right:

• Switch to landscape. Page Layout → Orientation → Landscape. A wide table is a wide shape, so give it a wide page.
• Fit to one page wide. Page Layout → Scale to Fit → Width: 1 page. Excel shrinks the print until the width fits. Keep an eye on the font size: below about 7pt it becomes hard to read on paper.
• Hide columns nobody needs. Working columns, internal IDs and in-between calculations rarely belong in something you send. Hidden columns are not printed.

Headings vanish after page one

A forty-row table splits across two pages, and page two arrives as a block of unlabelled numbers because the header row stayed behind.

The setting is Page Layout → Print Titles → Rows to repeat at top. Give it your header row, and Excel prints that row at the top of every page (Microsoft's help page on repeating rows on every printed page shows the same steps). This is the most useful setting in this article, and very few people know it exists.

Page breaks in absurd places

A section splits one row before its end, or a chart lands half on each page.

View → Page Break Preview shows exactly where every break will fall, drawn over your data as blue lines. You can drag them. Ten seconds in that view before converting prevents most complaints about the result.

Only part of the sheet appears

Usually this is a print area that was set earlier and forgotten. Excel remembers it and exports only that part. Page Layout → Print Area → Clear Print Area.

The reverse also happens: hundreds of blank pages, because a stray space in cell BZ4000 makes Excel think the sheet goes that far. Select every row below your data, delete them properly (right-click → Delete, not the Delete key), and save.

Check before you convert, not after

You can see every one of these problems in Excel's own print preview: Ctrl+P, or Cmd+P on a Mac. What that preview shows is very close to what the PDF will be.

Make it a habit, because after conversion your options are much worse. A PDF only records where marks sit on a page. It has no idea that some of them were a table. To fix the layout of a PDF, you have to go back to the spreadsheet anyway.

What to expect from any converter

Some things come from the formats themselves, not from the tool, and no converter avoids them.

• Formulas become values. A PDF cannot recalculate. =SUM(B2:B40) arrives as the number it produced. Normally this is what you wanted.
• Interactivity is gone. Filters, sorting, collapsible groups and validation have nowhere to live in a PDF.
• Hidden rows and columns stay hidden. Handy, but check it. People have sent PDFs thinking hidden columns were removed, when they were only not shown.
• Multiple sheets need a decision. Some converters export only the active sheet. If your workbook has three, confirm all three arrived.

Converting here

Excel to PDF runs in your browser, and the workbook is never uploaded. That is important when it holds salaries, customer lists or anything else you would not email to a stranger.

If you want to see how a converter handles a multi-sheet file before trusting it with yours, our sample workbook has three sheets, mixed types and a summary that adds up the others. It was built for exactly that check.

When a PDF is the wrong answer

Ask this before you convert at all. A PDF is right when the layout must not change and the recipient should not edit it: a signed report, an invoice, something for print.

If the recipient needs to sort, filter or add to the data, a PDF makes their life much harder. They will ask for the spreadsheet, or worse, type it all in again. Send the .xlsx, or send both.