All essentials

Drop a workbook and I'll set it out as a PDF — nothing is uploaded.

Free tool

Excel to PDF

Convert an Excel workbook to PDF with the columns sized from the data rather than from the print settings in the file. Pick the sheets, the page size and the type size; a table too wide for the page continues on a later page instead of being cut off.

Good to know

  • Choose which sheets go in — a workbook is usually several working sheets and one table worth printing.
  • Column widths are measured from the data, so a spreadsheet nobody set up for printing still comes out readable.
  • The header row repeats at the top of every page, and the text stays text, so the PDF is searchable.

Your files stay on your machine

This tool runs entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent to a server — close the tab and every trace is gone.

These are the free ones — see the full suite

How big a file can it take?

There is no upload, so there is no upload limit — but the work happens in this tab, which means your browser’s memory is the budget. Nothing here will refuse a file for being large; a big enough one simply gets slow and, eventually, reloads the tab. The figures below are rules of thumb on a desktop browser, not enforced caps. On a phone or tablet, expect a good deal less.

  • Both the workbook and the finished PDF are held at once — comfortable to around 20,000 rows across the sheets you tick.
  • Rows become pages: 20,000 rows is several hundred pages, and the laying-out is what takes the time rather than the reading.

Password-protected PDFs are declined whatever their size — unlock the file first. If a run does die on a long document, splitting it into volumes and working through them one at a time is the reliable way round it.

Built on open source

The Essentials tools do their work in your browser using these open-source libraries, used under the licenses below. Each remains the copyright of its authors.

  • pdf-libMIT · creates and edits the PDFs you download
  • pdf.jsApache-2.0 · reads your PDF and renders the page previews
  • SheetJS (xlsx)Apache-2.0 · reads Excel workbooks — .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb and .ods
  • hyparquetMIT · reads Apache Parquet files
  • hyparquet-compressorsMIT · the Parquet codecs beyond Snappy — Gzip, Zstd, Brotli, LZ4
  • JSZipMIT · bundles multi-file results into one ZIP
  • LucideISC · the icons throughout these tools
  • ReactMIT · the interface itself
  • Next.jsMIT · builds and serves these pages

pdf.js ships fallback fonts contributed by Foxit Software, redistributed here as part of pdf.js. JSZip is dual-licensed; it is used here under the MIT license.