In today’s post, we would be going over the steps to save your excel worksheet as a PDF document. At the end of this post, you should be able to quickly export your excel file as a PDF file all in your excel application. Let’s begin:
The sample data we would be using for today is a valuation summary of PayPal with forecast years ranging from 2021 to 2025. Please see the picture below
There are two ways of saving an excel sheet as PDF. The first is what I call the save as method whilst the second is the print to PDF method. With the former, you have no control over the output. For a worksheet with many columns, the output file may break a single worksheet into multiple pages in the PDF document. The latter however allows for adjusting the orientation and forcing excel to fit all columns or all rows on a single page.
Save as Method
To save as PDF using the save as method, just follow these steps
Step 1: Navigate to the file button in the excel ribbon and click it.
Step 2: Click on Save as on the file tab and then Browse to select the location to save it to on your system
Step 3: In the save as type dropdown, select PDF
Step 4: Click on options
Step 5: You can choose to publish just a selection, an active sheet or the entire workbook
Result: The document is saved without guidance on how many columns to be displayed on a single page. Excel saves it as pdf prioritizing legibility above all and inadvertently breaking spreadsheets with too many columns into separate pages.
You can see from the image above that excel has broken other columns in the model into new pages. There is a total of 4 pages in the pdf file that was created, however I prefer all the information on a single page. That’s where the print to PDF method comes in handy.
Print to PDF Method
This method gives you way more control than the previous method. As already established in previous sections, we could force excel to squeeze all columns or rows into one page but please bear in mind that if there are too many columns or too many rows the information on the pdf page may be very tiny and not at all legible.
Step 1: Navigate to the file button in the excel ribbon and click it
Step 2: Click on print on the file tab and adjust the settings as you like and see fit. From the image above, you can see that we chose to fit all columns on one page and to show it in a landscape orientation
Step 3: If you are not satisfied with the options on this print preview page, you can choose to fine tune it more by clicking on page setup.
Step 4: When you are done adjusting the paper size, margins and other aspects, then click on print and save it to whichever folder you like
Result: All columns are on a single page and the information on the page is quite legible for the amount of information contained in it.
