Will it look like my spreadsheet does in Excel?

No. You get the data as a clean table: values, rows and columns, with the first row optionally set as a header. Colours, borders, merged cells, conditional formatting, charts and images are not carried over, and columns are given equal width rather than the widths you set. For a pixel-exact copy, Excel's own Save as PDF is the right tool — it knows your print areas and page breaks.

Do dates come out correctly?

Yes, and this is worth knowing about. Excel does not store dates as dates — it stores a day count from 1900 and marks the cell with a date format. A converter that ignores that prints 45678 instead of 2025-01-15. This one reads the workbook's style table, finds the cells formatted as dates or times, and converts them properly.

What happens to formulas?

The last computed value is used. Every .xlsx caches the result of each formula alongside the formula itself, so a normal workbook converts with all its numbers intact. A file written by a program that never calculated the formulas will show blanks in those cells — nothing here evaluates formulas.

My table has too many columns and the text is tiny.

Columns get equal width, so a wide sheet squeezes. Turn on landscape (it is on by default), set margins to narrow, and consider whether every column needs to be there. Beyond roughly a dozen columns, no page size will make it comfortable — that is a limit of the paper, not the converter.

Does it support .xls or .csv?

Only .xlsx. The old .xls is a binary format from a different era and shares nothing with .xlsx but the name — open it in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets and save as .xlsx first. For a CSV, use the TXT to PDF tool, or open it in a spreadsheet program and export .xlsx.

Is my workbook uploaded?

No. The .xlsx is unzipped and its XML read inside your browser, and the PDF is built in memory. Spreadsheets hold payroll, pricing, customer lists and financial models — exactly what should not be sent to someone else's server for a format conversion.

Excel to PDF — Convert XLSX to PDF in Your Browser

A spreadsheet is data; a PDF is a document

Sending a workbook sends a working file: formulas someone can break, columns they can hide, numbers they can change. Sending a PDF sends a statement of what the numbers were. That is why finance, procurement and reporting workflows all end in a PDF even when the work was done in Excel.

It also solves the plainer problem of the recipient not having Excel, or opening it on a phone where a wide sheet is unreadable.

Reading .xlsx without a spreadsheet engine

An .xlsx file is a zip archive of XML. That is what makes this possible in a browser: the workbook lists its sheets, a relationship file maps them to their worksheet XML, and each worksheet holds its cells. Text is stored once in a shared-string table and referenced by index, because spreadsheets repeat themselves enormously.

All of that can be read with the zip library and XML parser already present, which keeps the tool light. What a full spreadsheet library would add — formula evaluation, charts, pivot tables — is not needed when the destination is a printed table.

The date problem

Excel has no date type. A date is a number — days elapsed since the start of 1900 — and the only thing marking it as a date is the cell's number format. Convert naively and every date in your document prints as a five-digit number.

So the workbook's style table is read, the cells whose format is a date or a time are identified, and those numbers are converted back into readable dates. The conversion even reproduces Excel's famous 1900 leap-year bug, because every spreadsheet in existence depends on it and dates would otherwise land a day out.

Wide sheets

Columns are given equal width, since the widths you set in Excel are about screen space rather than paper. Landscape is on by default and makes a real difference; narrow margins add a little more. Past a dozen or so columns, though, a table stops fitting on a page in any orientation — at that point the honest answer is to split the sheet.

Common uses

Sending a report as a fixed document rather than a live file
Attaching figures to an application or a submission
Printing a sheet from a machine with no spreadsheet software
Archiving a monthly export in a format that will still open
Sharing data with someone who should not edit it

Privacy

The workbook never leaves your device. Given what spreadsheets tend to contain — salaries, pricing, customer records — that matters more here than almost anywhere else on this site.

Excel to PDF