The short version
You’ve got a spreadsheet. You need to send it to someone who shouldn’t (or can’t) open it in Excel, or you want to print it without the gridlines going haywire, or a form demands a PDF. This converts your .xlsx or .xls into a tidy, locked-down PDF that opens on anything.
Upload, convert, download. The numbers, formatting, and cell layout all come along for the ride.
Why a PDF instead of the raw spreadsheet
Sending someone an Excel file is a small gamble. They might have an older version. They might not have Excel at all. They might accidentally drag a cell and break a formula, then ask why your totals are wrong. A PDF sidesteps every one of those. The recipient sees the exact grid you saw, frozen in place, viewable in any browser or PDF reader.
It’s also the cleaner choice for anything official. Invoices, budgets, price lists, audit tables. You want those to look the same in every inbox, and you definitely don’t want them editable.
Under the hood
The file goes to the server, where a headless LibreOffice Calc engine opens the workbook and renders each sheet to PDF pages. It respects the print layout Excel would use: column widths, row heights, cell borders, number formatting, fills, and fonts. Wide sheets get split across pages the same way a print preview would handle them.
Both formats are accepted. The modern .xlsx and the older .xls binary format both work without any extra steps.
Things worth knowing before you convert
Spreadsheets are trickier than plain documents because they can be enormous and oddly shaped. A few pointers:
- Set your print area in Excel first if you only want part of a giant sheet. The converter renders what the workbook says to print.
- Really wide tables with 40 columns will wrap onto multiple pages. That’s normal print behavior, not a bug. Consider landscape orientation or fitting columns to a page before exporting.
- Formulas show their results, not the formula text. A cell with
=SUM(A1:A10)shows the total, which is exactly what you want in a shared document. - Charts and conditional formatting generally render fine, though extremely custom chart styling can shift slightly.
For a clean single-page table, the output is genuinely sharp. The messiness only shows up with sprawling, unstructured sheets.
How to do it
- Pick your
.xlsxor.xlsfile (50 MB max). - Click Convert to PDF.
- Give the server a moment to render every sheet.
- Grab the PDF.
What happens to your spreadsheet afterward
Your uploaded file and the generated PDF are both deleted automatically roughly an hour after the job runs. Financial data, client lists, internal budgets, whatever you convert, none of it sticks around. The server processes it and then clears it out on a timer.
FAQ
Does every sheet in my workbook get converted?
Yes. Multi-sheet workbooks render each sheet onto its own pages, in order, in a single PDF.
Will my formulas break?
Nope. The PDF captures the calculated values, so your totals and averages appear exactly as they do in Excel. There’s nothing to recalculate.
Why is my table split across several pages?
Because it’s wider or taller than one page. Set a print area, switch to landscape, or use “Fit to one page” in Excel before converting if you want it on a single sheet.
Can I convert an old .xls file?
Yep, the legacy binary format works right alongside .xlsx. No conversion to the newer format needed first.
How big a file can I upload?
Up to 50 MB, which covers spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows.
Is my data stored anywhere?
Only briefly. The upload and the PDF are wiped automatically about an hour after conversion.