Why Excel turns into too many PDF pages, and how to fix it

A grid with no edges

A Word document is written onto pages. A spreadsheet is a grid that runs to sixteen thousand columns and a million rows, and nothing in it says where a page begins. When it is converted to PDF, something has to decide where to cut it — and that something is the sheet's print settings, the same ones Excel uses when you press Print.

With no settings at all, the grid is cut at the edge of the paper. Everything to the right of the paper's width goes onto another page, and so does everything below its height. A sheet twenty columns wide is not twenty columns on one page; it is the first eight or nine columns on one page and the rest on the next ones.

Excel to PDF on this site follows the workbook's own print settings, so every fix below is made in the spreadsheet and works the same in any converter that respects them.

What we measured

One test sheet — twenty columns, forty rows of numbers — converted with different settings on our own engine:

• No settings: 3 pages.
• Landscape, nothing else: 4 pages. Landscape is wider and shorter, so it fits more columns and fewer rows on each sheet of paper — for a sheet with a few dozen rows, that is worse, not better.
• Fit all columns on one page: 1 page.
• A print area of A1 to E20: 1 page, containing only those cells.
• A tiny table plus one formatted cell at Z500: 2 pages. The second contains nothing visible.

The last result is the one people do not expect. A cell you once typed in, formatted, or put a single space into still belongs to the sheet, and the converter prints everything up to it.

The settings that fix it

All of these are on Excel's Page Layout tab, are saved in the file, and are followed when it is converted.

• Fit to one page wide. Under Scale to Fit, set Width to 1 page and leave Height on Automatic. Columns stop splitting, and long sheets still run onto as many pages as they need. This one setting fixes most cases.
• Set a print area. Select the cells that matter, then Print Area, Set Print Area. Nothing outside it is printed — which also removes the stray-cell pages.
• Repeat the header row. Under Print Titles, set Rows to repeat at top, so page three still says what each column is.
• Choose orientation after scaling, not before. Landscape helps a sheet that is wide and short. For a sheet that is long, it adds pages.
• Check in Page Break Preview. The View tab shows exactly where pages will be cut, as blue lines you can drag.

To find a stray cell, press Ctrl+End: Excel jumps to the last cell it considers used. If that is far beyond your data, select the empty rows and columns in between, delete them (not just clear them), and save.

Every sheet, and only the visible ones

A workbook converts as a whole. Each visible sheet starts on a new page, in tab order, each with its own print settings, so a tidy first sheet and an untidy second one give a PDF that is half right. Set up every sheet you want in the PDF, not just the one on screen.

Hidden sheets are left out — in our test, a hidden sheet's contents did not appear in the PDF at all. That is convenient, but it is not a way to keep something confidential: the PDF is safe, the .xlsx you might also send is not, because a hidden sheet is one right-click away from being shown.

If a workbook has a sheet you do not want, the reliable fix is to save a copy without it. If the PDF already has pages you do not want, Remove pages from PDF takes them out without converting again, and PDF page count tells you how many there are before you send it.

Before you send it

Two checks worth the minute they take.

Look for #### and cut-off text. A column too narrow for its number prints as hash marks, exactly as on screen, and a cell whose text overflows into an empty neighbour prints cut off when the neighbour is not empty. Widen the column in Excel; scaling the page smaller does not help, because it shrinks the column and the number together.

Check the totals are the ones you meant. The PDF shows each formula's result as it was last calculated. If calculation is set to manual, or the workbook was saved mid-edit, a total can be out of date. Press F9 in Excel and save before converting.

Converting Word, Excel and PowerPoint to PDF covers what each format loses on the way, and how to check a converted document covers the figures worth checking one by one.