by Svetlana Cheusheva , updated on March 22, 2023
This short tutorial describes 4 possible ways to convert Excel files to PDF - by using Excel's Save As feature, Adobe software, online Excel to PDF converters and desktop tools.
Converting an Excel worksheet to PDF is often necessary if you want to let other users view your data but not edit it. You may also want to convert your Excel spreadsheet into a neater PDF format for a media kit, presentation and reports, or make a file that can be opened and read by all users, even if they don't have Microsoft Excel installed, for example on a tablet or phone.
These days PDF is arguably one of the most popular file formats. According to Google, there are over 153 mil PDF files on the web, and only 2.5 mil Excel files (.xls and .xlsx).
Further on in this article, I will explain several possible ways of exporting Excel to PDF with detailed steps and screenshots:
Though the .pdf and .xls formats have been around for quite a while and both have always been popular among users, the possibility to export Excel files directly to PDF appeared in Excel 2007. So, if you have any version of Excel 2007 through 365, you can do a PDF conversion in a quick and straightforward way.
Microsoft Excel allows exporting selected ranges or tables as well as saving one or several worksheets or the entire workbook as a PDF file.
As you see, exporting Excel files to PDF using the built-in Excel means is easy. Of course, Microsoft Excel provides only a few basic settings, but with just a little experience, one can learn to prepare the source files in such a way that no further adjustments would be needed. Anyway, if you are not happy with the capabilities of Excel's Save As feature, let's examine Adobe's offerings.
Regrettably, Adobe is not as generous as Microsoft when it comes to Excel to PDF conversions and does not provide any free means for this. However, they do have this feature incorporated in paid tools or subscriptions, which - one should give them their due - do the job really well.
Adobe Reader X and earlier versions included the option to install the Adobe PDF Printer, which could be used to export Excel files to PDF. However, this feature is not available in the latest version of Adobe Reader XI.
Instead, they introduced the Create PDF tab that enables you to make PDF from .xls or .xlsx files in a single button click, provided that you have a paid subscription.
If you are one of few lucky users of this powerful suite, creating a PDF file from an Excel worksheet is as easy as clicking PDF from File. under the Create toolbar.
Alternatively, Adobe Acrobat Pro lets you create a PDF file directly from Excel in one of the following ways:
If you are interested to get a 30-day trial version of Adobe Acrobat XI, you can download it here. If you are not willing to pay a $20 monthly fee for the Acrobat XI Pro subscription, let's see what free Excel to PDF converters have to offer.
Luckily for us, there are a lot of free Excel to PDF Converters online that provide various options for converting Excel documents into PDF files. Below you will find the reviews of the 4 most popular online converters.
To test the abilities of online PDF converters on different data types, I created the following two workbooks:
Now that the preparations are complete, let's see how the online Excel to PDF converters will cope with the challenge.
Another online Excel to PDF converter is available at www.freepdfconvert.com. Apart from Excel sheets, this tool can also convert Word documents, PowerPoint presentations as well as web pages and images to PDF.
As you see in the image above, the interface is also very clear and hardly requires any explanations. You simply navigate between tabs to choose a proper conversion type, then browse for the original file, select the desired format and click Convert.
When the conversion is finished, you can either download the resulting PDF file to your computer or save it to Google docs:
This Excel to PDF converter has a free versions and paid subscriptions. Here are the main limitations of the free version:
If you are curious to learn more about this tool, you can find the complete feature list as well as a list of available subscriptions and prices here.
Unlike the previous PDF converter, this one has produced very decent results on the 1 st workbook, without any format distortions or errors.
As for the 2 nd workbook, it was accurately and flawlessly converted. into a Word document (.docx). My first though was that I mistakenly chose a wrong format for the conversion, so I repeated the process and got the same result, as you can see in the screenshot below:
Giving it a second thought, I came to the following conclusion. The converter could not export the custom format of my Excel sheet to PDF properly, so it converted it to the closest format. It was actually a matter seconds to save the Word document as PDF using Word's Save As dialog and get a nicely formatted PDF file as the result.
This online PDF converter allows you to create PDF documents from many formats, including Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint, as well as JPEG, PNG images and HTML pages.
Soda PDF Online Services provide free and paid memberships. For free, you can get unlimited PDF creation and limited PDF Conversions, one file every 30 minutes. If you want more, you will have to upgrade to Premium (around $ 10 per 3 months). In this case, you will also get the ability to merge and split PDF files.
This online Excel to PDF converter was almost impeccable. The 1 st workbook was converted to PDF faultlessly, the 2 nd workbook was also converted without any errors, but the first letter in one word was truncated:
As you see, none of the free Excel to PDF online converters is perfect, though Soda PDF is very close. Someone may think the problem is with my original Excel documents. I agree, the second workbook has quite a sophisticated custom format. This is because my purpose was to perform some sort of "stress testing" to reveal the real potential of PDF to Excel online converters since your actual workbooks may be far more complex and sophisticated in terms of contents and format.
For the sake of experiment, I converted both test workbooks to PDF using Excel's Save As dialog and it coped with the task absolutely fine - the resulting PDF files were the exact replicas of the original Excel documents.
Besides online Excel to PDF converters, there exists a variety of desktop tools for converting Excel files into PDF documents that provide different options depending on what you expect in a final document: from free one-click utilities to enterprise-level professional packages. Since we are mainly interested in free Excel to PDF converters, let's have a closer look at a couple of such tools.
Foxit Reader is a small PDF viewer that allows you to view, sign and print PDF files as well as create PDF documents from Excel workbooks. It lets you convert Excel spreadsheets to PDF either from Foxit Reader or directly from Excel.
This is the fastest way to convert an Excel workbook to PDF that requires only 3 quick steps.
Please pay attention that the Excel Holiday Gift List, which was a hard nut to crack for most of the online Excel to PDF converters, present no difficulty at all for this desktop tool!Note. Foxit Reader saves all the sheets of the selected workbook to PDF. So, if you want to convert only a certain worksheet, save it as an individual workbook first.
This approach is recommended if you want more options to preview and customize the resulting PDF document.
After installation Foxit Reader adds "Foxit Reader PDF Printer" to your list of printers, which is, in fact, a pseudo printer that can be used to configure the final appearance of your PDF document.
As you make changes, they are immediately reflected in the document Preview on the right.
If you want more options, click the Page Setup link under Settings. 
When all the edits are done, click the Print button to save the file. This will open the standard Excel Save as dialog window where you choose a destination folder and type the file name.
PrimoPDF is one more pseudo printer that can help you export your Excel documents to the PDF format. The features and options provided by this software are very similar to Foxit Reader's, and you set it up exactly in the same way - select PrimoPDF under Printer and play with the settings.
Hopefully, this quick review of desktop and online Excel to PDF converters has helped you to choose your winner. If none of the presented tools is the ideal fit for your task, you can try some alternative methods, for example, uploading your Excel files to Google Sheets and then exporting them to PDF, or converting Excel to PDF via Open Office.
In the next article, we will handle the opposite task and explore the specificities of importing PDF files to Excel. I thank you for reading and hope to see you again next week!
