Excel to PDF

Turn a spreadsheet into a PDF that paginates the way the workbook is set up to print.

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What this tool does

Excel to PDF hands your workbook to LibreOffice running headless on the processing service, which opens it in Calc and writes the result through its PDF export filter. XLS, XLSX, ODS and plain CSV are all accepted, and every file you add is converted on its own: five workbooks come back as five PDFs named after their originals, not as one combined document.

How the pages break is decided by the workbook rather than by anything on this page. LibreOffice reads the print area, the manual page breaks, the fit-to-width scaling, the repeated header rows and the paper size that were saved into the file, and follows them. A sheet twenty columns wide with no print area set will spill across several sheets of paper here for the same reason it does from Excel's own print dialogue, so the shortest route to a tidy XLSX to PDF conversion is to set that up in the spreadsheet, save, and then upload.

There is no settings panel below the file list, and its absence is deliberate rather than unfinished. Two controls, Page size and Embed fonts, were carried here until it became clear the Calc export filter could honour neither — a spreadsheet arrives with its own paper size, and LibreOffice already embeds any non-standard typeface whether or not a checkbox asks it to — so they were deleted from the code instead of left sitting there being ignored. Fit-to-width, margins, gridlines and repeated rows are properties of the file as well. The upload is the whole of the input, and the workbook's page setup is the control panel.

The work happens on the server, because LibreOffice cannot run inside a browser tab. Your spreadsheet travels there over an encrypted connection and is converted in a scratch folder holding its own LibreOffice profile, so no two jobs can share state; the upload, the finished PDF and the job row that recorded the request are then swept together when the retention window on that job runs out — hours rather than days, though not the moment your download finishes. A file may be up to 200 MB, a conversion is killed if it passes five minutes, and a workbook that will not open without its password stops with an error naming it as protected or corrupt instead of returning half a document.

How to use it

  1. Add the spreadsheet. XLS, XLSX, ODS or CSV, within the 200 MB upload ceiling. Add several and each is converted separately, returning one PDF per file.
  2. Set the print layout in the spreadsheet first. Print area, scaling, page breaks, repeated header rows and whether gridlines print are all read from the file, so anything you want changed has to be changed there and saved before you upload.
  3. Start the conversion. Signed out, a short verification question comes first, because LibreOffice jobs are the heaviest work this server does. Signing in skips it. The conversion itself is stopped if it passes five minutes.
  4. Open the PDF before you send it on. Fonts the server does not have are substituted, which can shift line breaks and add a page, so check that columns and totals landed where you expected.

Processing & privacy

Secure server processing. This operation requires temporary server processing.

Common use cases

Sending figures to someone without a spreadsheet app

A PDF opens on any phone and prints the same everywhere, and nobody can nudge a cell or break a formula on the way through.

Attaching a quote, invoice or timesheet

A template that already carries its print area and header rows converts into the same page the office printer would produce.

Archiving a month's numbers

A PDF fixes the figures as they stood at the close of the period, where the workbook itself keeps recalculating and its external links keep drifting.

Making a CSV export readable

A raw CSV from a database or a billing system arrives as one column of text in plain viewers. Calc lays it out as a grid across numbered pages instead, as long as the file uses the separator LibreOffice assumes by default; a semicolon-delimited export needs a detour through a spreadsheet application first.

Questions

Is my spreadsheet uploaded?
Yes, and there is no browser-only route for this format. LibreOffice is a desktop application, so the workbook goes to the processing service over an encrypted connection, is converted there, and is deleted with the PDF it produced and the job row that described it once the retention window closes.
Why is my sheet split across several pages?
Because the workbook is laid out that way. Nothing here re-flows a sheet to fit a page — set the print area and the fit-to-width scaling in the spreadsheet, save it, and convert again to see the change.
Where have the settings gone?
There are none to show. The page size and font-embedding controls that once sat here were removed from the code, because the export filter had no way to act on either, and a control that changes nothing is worse than no control at all. To put the finished PDF onto a fixed sheet size afterwards, run it through Change PDF Page Size.
My CSV came out as a single column — why?
Because the converter is launched without import options, so LibreOffice falls back to its own defaults when it opens a text file. A comma-separated UTF-8 export usually lands correctly; one delimited with semicolons or tabs, or saved in a legacy code page, can arrive as one column per row or with accented characters mangled. Open it in a spreadsheet application, set the separator and encoding there, save as .xlsx or .ods, and convert that instead.
Will it look exactly as it does in Excel?
Close, not identical. The sheet is re-rendered with the fonts installed on the server, and substituted fonts can change column widths, line breaks and the page count. Ordinary cell formatting, borders and embedded charts usually survive the import; anything drawn by an Excel add-in may not.
Can I convert a password-protected workbook?
No. LibreOffice cannot open it without the password, so the job fails rather than producing a broken file. Remove the password in Excel or Calc, save a copy, and convert that copy.
Do macros run during the conversion?
No. LibreOffice is started with no argument that would execute one, and .xlsm is not among the extensions the file picker offers, so whatever a macro would have written into the sheet is simply absent from the PDF. What you get are the values the workbook had when it was last saved.
Can I get one PDF from several files?
Not in a single job — each spreadsheet is converted on its own and keeps its own name. Run them through Merge PDF afterwards if you need them bound into one document.

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