How to Convert Excel to PDF

This article was co-authored by Luigi Oppido and by wikiHow staff writer, Nicole Levine, MFA. Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, several readers have written to tell us that this article was helpful to them, earning it our reader-approved status.

This article has been viewed 1,600,891 times.

Converting an Excel file to a PDF makes it easier for people to open the and view the file on various platforms—even if they don't have Microsoft Office. PDFs are also easier to print and distribute than Excel spreadsheets. If you have Microsoft Excel, you can easily convert your spreadsheet to a PDF by saving or exporting it within the app. If you don't have Excel, you can use Google Sheets, a tool on Google Drive, to make the conversion for free.

Using Excel for Windows

• Note that PDF conversions cannot be easily reverted back into an Excel sheet, but this method will preserve your original copy.
• If you're on a Mac, jump to our method on Excel for Mac.

Click the Options… button. This will allow you to adjust the settings for the PDF file you are about to create.

• If you selected an area of your spreadsheet to save as a PDF, choose Selection under "Publish what." This ensures that only that selected area is saved as a PDF.
• If you'd rather save the entire visible worksheet as a PDF, choose Active sheet(s) instead.
• If you want to choose specific pages from the workbook to save as a PDF, use the "Page(s)" drop-down menus to define the first and last pages.
• Click OK to continue.

• If you want to change the location to which you're saving the file, you can navigate to that folder in the window now.

Name the file and click Publish . This exports the selected information to a new PDF file with the name you've entered.

• It's not really possible to edit the PDF now, so if you need to make changes you'll want to make them in the Excel document and then create a new PDF.

Using Google Drive

• If you're not already signed in to your Google account, sign in when prompted.

Click the Excel spreadsheet in your Google Drive. This opens the spreadsheet in Google Sheets, Google's free spreadsheet editor.

Click PDF document (.pdf) . This displays a preview of your PDF in the Google Sheets printing window.

• The PDF will save in the same orientation as the spreadsheet (usually landscape mode). If you'd rather it be in portrait (vertical) mode, select Portrait under "Page orientation."
• Change the scale (the size/fit on the page) and margin size if necessary.
• Click Formatting to choose whether to display gridlines and/or notes, adjust the page order, and change the alignment.
• To add headers and footers to the tops and bottoms of pages, click Headers & footers, and then check the boxes to choose which information to display.
• If your spreadsheet contains a lot of data and cuts off in odd places, click SET CUSTOM PAGE BREAKS in the right panel. Here, you can drag the blue lines to adjust where each page begins and ends. Click CONFIRM BREAKS at the top-right to save your changes.

• If the download doesn't begin automatically, choose a location to which you'll save the PDF, and then click Save to download it.

Using Excel for Mac

• Select all of the worksheets in your entire workbook. To do this, click the tab for the first sheet at the bottom of excel, hold down the Shift key, and then click the last sheet's tab to select all.
• Click the Layout tab and then click Header & Footer.
• Click the Customize Header. and Customize Footer. buttons to edit the headers and footers for all of the sheets.

• PDF conversions cannot be easily converted back into an Excel sheet, but this method will preserve your original copy.

• If you want to save the PDF to a new folder, you can select that folder now. # Type a different name for the file. The name of the current Excel file appears in the "Save As" field. You will need to enter a different name (even if it's just slightly different) to avoid accidentally overwriting the spreadsheet file. [2] X Trustworthy Source Microsoft Support Technical support and product information from Microsoft. Go to source

Click the "Format" or "File Format" menu and select PDF . This menu may have a slightly different name depending on your version of Excel.

Select what gets included in the PDF. At the bottom of the window, you can select Workbook (to convert the entire workbook), Sheet (to save only the active sheet as a PDF), or Selection (to save just the selected area as a PDF).

• If the headers don't match on a multi-sheet file, a separate file will be created for each sheet.

• Open the first PDF file by double-clicking its name in its folder.
• Click the View menu and select Thumbnails. [3] X Research source
• Click the last thumbnail to select it. This tells Preview to add the next PDF to the end of the current document.
• Click the Edit menu and select Insert >Page from File.
• Select the next PDF in the range and click Open.
• Repeat this process until you've added all PDFs.
• Click File and select Export as PDF.

Expert Q&A

Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

If you're sending a large Excel sheet, or if you want to send multiple files at once, you can compress the files as a zip folder. Then, the other person can unzip the folder and see all of the original files.

Thanks! We're glad this was helpful.
Thank you for your feedback.
If wikiHow has helped you, please consider a small contribution to support us in helping more readers like you. We’re committed to providing the world with free how-to resources, and even $1 helps us in our mission. Support wikiHow

In Excel go to Page Layout. In the Scale to Fit section, make sure Width and Height are both set to one page, then save the Excel document as a PDF.

Thanks! We're glad this was helpful.
Thank you for your feedback.
If wikiHow has helped you, please consider a small contribution to support us in helping more readers like you. We’re committed to providing the world with free how-to resources, and even $1 helps us in our mission. Support wikiHow

In Microsoft Office Suite 2016. There's an option to export under File. From there, you can choose the Export to PDF option.

Thanks! We're glad this was helpful.
Thank you for your feedback.
If wikiHow has helped you, please consider a small contribution to support us in helping more readers like you. We’re committed to providing the world with free how-to resources, and even $1 helps us in our mission. Support wikiHow

If you're sending a large Excel sheet to someone who also has Microsoft Excel, or if you need to send multiple files, try compressing the files instead of converting them to a PDF.

You Might Also Like

How to Convert a Microsoft Word Document to PDF

3 Free & Easy Ways to Convert a Photo to PDF on iPhone

How to Convert JPG Files to PDFs: 6 Easy Options

6 Quick Ways to Scan Documents to PDF on Mobile or Desktop

How to Copy Text from a PDF to a Microsoft Word Document

Create a PDF of a Webpage in Any Browser

3 Free Ways to Convert PDF to JPEG: PC, Mac, Android, & iPhone

Easy Ways to Turn a PDF into an Image File