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Excel to PDF

XLSX into PDF, sheet by sheet. Free, no sign-up.

or drop it here

Excel to PDF runs inside your browser — your file never reaches our servers.

How to convert Excel to PDF

Converting a spreadsheet to PDF makes it readable by anyone, without formulas shifting.

  1. Select your spreadsheet. An .xlsx. A pre-2007 .xls must be re-saved as .xlsx first — Excel does it from Save As.
  2. Convert. Sheets are laid out as pages.
  3. Download. A PDF anyone can open.

How the grid lands on the page

Every worksheet with anything in it is drawn, each starting on a fresh page under its own name in bold. Pages are A4 landscape, because a spreadsheet is wider than it is tall far more often than not. Column widths come from the longest value in each column, counted only as far as 40 characters so one long note cannot squeeze every other column to nothing, then scaled so the whole sheet fits the page width. Nothing is ever split sideways onto a second sheet of paper, however many columns there are. Rows are 16pt tall, the first row is shaded and bold as a header, and a long sheet flows down as many pages as it needs.

Two consequences are worth knowing before you print thirty pages. Every cell is drawn at 8.5pt whatever size it is in Excel; and a value too wide for its column is truncated with an ellipsis rather than allowed to overlap its neighbour, so a sheet of twenty-odd columns stays legible but starts losing the ends of long labels. Hide the columns you do not need, or split the sheet, first. Past 500 rows the note under the download says outright that the sheet was laid out as a plain grid. Empty trailing rows are dropped, a value sitting in C2 with A2 and B2 empty stays in column C, and a chart sheet holds no cells so produces no page.

Values, not formatting

Folia reads the value Excel last calculated and stored in each cell, not the formula behind it, so the PDF shows what the workbook was showing when Excel last saved it. Number formatting lives in a different part of the package and this converter does not read it, which has one visible effect: numbers appear exactly as they are stored. A date shows as its serial number — 45292 rather than 1 January 2024 — a currency cell as 1234.5, a percentage as 0.075.

If the formatting is the point, add a helper column that turns those cells into text with Excel's TEXT function, and convert that. Charts, images, cell fills and conditional formatting are not drawn, and text in a merged block appears in its top-left column. To go the other way and pull tables out of a PDF into real typed cells, use PDF to Excel.

Questions

What happens to very wide sheets?

Wide sheets are split across pages, the same way Excel’s own print layout does it. Check the result if column alignment matters.

Are hidden sheets included?

Yes. Every worksheet in the file is drawn, whether or not it is hidden in Excel. Hidden sheets are a common home for working notes, old pricing and pasted source data, so delete them from a saved copy before converting something you are sending on.

Does it follow my print area and page breaks?

No. Print areas, manual page breaks, print titles and repeated header rows are Excel print settings, and none of them is read. The layout here is its own: a page per sheet onwards, all columns scaled to the page width, rows flowing on as they need to.

Can I convert just one sheet?

There is no sheet picker. Copy the sheet you want into a new workbook, or delete the others from a saved copy, and convert that file.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Every tool on this site runs inside your browser, using the same engine as the Folia desktop app. Your file is read from your disk into your browser’s memory, processed there, and handed back as a download. It never crosses the internet, so there is nothing for us to store, leak or hand over.

Is there a file size limit?

We impose none. The only ceiling is your own device’s memory, which differs from one computer to another — so we read what your browser reports about this machine and show the resulting limit on the page. Light tools like merge and rotate handle far more than heavy ones like OCR, which must render every page. For anything larger, Folia for Desktop has no limit at all.

Is it really free? Do I need an account?

Yes, and no. Every tool is free and unlimited, with no watermark and no sign-up. Ads pay for the site, and your own computer does the work, which costs us nothing. Signing in with a paid Folia plan simply removes the ads.

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