Spreadsheets are made for screens, not paper. Save a wide sheet as PDF without preparing it, and you often get columns cut off onto separate pages, or a table so small nobody can read it. A few minutes of preparation makes the PDF look professional.

1. Hide what readers don’t need

Most spreadsheets contain working columns: helper calculations, notes, old figures. They make the sheet wider and the PDF harder to read. Select those columns, right-click and choose Hide. Do the same for rows and whole sheets you don’t want to share.

When you convert with Excel to PDF on Convertpdfly, hidden sheets, rows and columns are left out automatically, so you don’t need to delete anything from your original file.

2. Make columns only as wide as they need to be

Columns that are wider than their contents waste space. In Excel, select all (Ctrl+A), then double-click any column border in the header to fit each column to its content. If a column has one very long entry, such as a comment, consider wrapping that text or shortening it. Very long text that doesn’t fit its column is cut short with “…” in the PDF.

3. Format numbers the way you want them to appear

The PDF shows each cell the way Excel displays it. Before converting, check:

  • Amounts have the right number of decimal places and thousands separators.
  • Dates use a clear format like 15/03/2026 or 15-Mar-2026.
  • Percentages show the percent sign.
  • Headings are bold.

4. Let the converter choose the orientation

A table with many columns fits much better on a landscape page. With Orientation set to Automatic, Convertpdfly switches wide sheets to landscape for you. If the sheet is still too wide, everything is scaled down evenly so all the columns fit across the page, instead of spilling onto extra pages.

Scaling has a limit: a sheet with 30 columns will become very small text on any page. If that happens, split the sheet into two narrower tables, or move less important columns to a second sheet.

5. Repeat the headings on every page

For long tables, readers need to see the column headings on each page. Convertpdfly repeats the first row at the top of every page automatically. Make sure your headings are in the first row of the sheet, without blank rows or titles above them, so the right row is repeated.

6. Gridlines or no gridlines?

Gridlines help readers follow long rows of numbers across the page. For reports and invoices with their own borders and colors, turning gridlines off often looks cleaner. Choose the option in the tool before converting.

7. Only the sheet you need

By default every visible sheet is converted, each starting on a new page. If you only want the first sheet, choose “First sheet only”.

Charts

Charts inside the workbook aren’t included by the converter yet; only cell data is converted. If a chart matters, copy it into a Word document (paste as a picture) and convert that with Word to PDF, then combine the two PDFs with Merge PDF.

Check the result

Open the PDF and scroll through every page before sending it. Look for cut-off text, empty pages and numbers shown as ##### (which means the column was too narrow in Excel). Fix them in the spreadsheet and convert again; it only takes seconds.

Need to go the other way? Our guide to extracting tables from a PDF into Excel explains how.