Excel to PDF
Processed in your browser — your files never leave this device.
The reason most people want a spreadsheet as a PDF is so that nobody can change it and so the charts travel with it. This free online converter does both. Charts are the interesting part: Excel stores a chart as its numbers plus how to plot them, so we redraw it as proper graphics in the PDF rather than taking a picture of it — sharp at any zoom, and matching the figures because it came from the figures. Wide sheets are turned landscape before anything is shrunk, because a table nobody can read is not a conversion.
How to use it
- Add your .xlsx. It is opened in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
- Every sheet becomes a table, using the column widths you set in Excel.
- A sheet too wide for a portrait page is turned landscape first, and only then is the text reduced.
- Charts are redrawn from their data, each on its own page so they are big enough to read.
- Pictures in the workbook are copied out unchanged and added at the end.
Examples
- A budget with a bar chart, sent as a PDF nobody can accidentally edit
- A wide report turned landscape so the columns stay readable
Frequently asked questions
- Do my charts come across?
- Yes, and they are redrawn rather than photographed. Excel keeps a chart as the underlying numbers and a description of how to plot them, so we plot them again in the PDF as vector graphics — column, bar, line, area and pie charts, with axes, category labels and a legend. That means the chart stays crisp when you zoom or print, and the bars are the right heights because they were computed from the same numbers Excel used. Anything using a chart type we do not draw is named on the page instead, so you know it was there.
- What happens to a very wide sheet?
- It is turned landscape before the type is shrunk. That order matters: rotating the page is free and costs you nothing in readability, whereas shrinking text has a floor below which the table is just a grey pattern. If a sheet is still too wide after rotating, the columns are scaled down together — keeping their relative widths, so the column you deliberately made wide stays wide — and the result tells you which sheets ended up tight so you can split them and try again.
- Are formulas kept?
- The results are, which is what a PDF needs. Excel stores both the formula and the value it last calculated, and a printed page wants the value — nobody reads a PDF to see =SUM(B2:B9). Dates and percentages are formatted the way the sheet formats them, so a date column arrives as dates rather than as five-digit serial numbers, which is a classic way for a converted spreadsheet to become nonsense.
- Can it open a .xls file?
- No. The older .xls is a different, binary format that a browser cannot read. Open it in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets and save it again as .xlsx, which takes a few seconds. The tool says so clearly when you hand it an old file instead of failing somewhere confusing.
- Is my spreadsheet uploaded?
- No. Everything happens in your browser, on your own device, and no part of the file is transmitted or stored. You can check by disconnecting from the internet once the page has loaded — it still works. Spreadsheets tend to hold exactly the things you would not want on someone else's server: salaries, customer lists, bank workings.