Excel to PDF without the table falling off the page

Spreadsheets have no pages. A sheet is an endless grid, and printing forces someone to decide where to cut it. That decision is why Excel printouts so often arrive with three stray columns on a second sheet.

Decide the orientation first

Count your columns. Up to about six columns of ordinary text fits portrait. Anything wider wants landscape. Excel to PDF defaults to landscape for exactly this reason, and you can switch it per file.

Then adjust text size

Smaller text fits more columns. Around 8 points stays comfortable to read on paper, and 6 points is about the smallest anyone will thank you for. If a table still does not fit at 6 points, the problem is the table, not the setting.

Fix the table instead

• Delete columns the reader does not need. Most exported sheets carry internal IDs nobody looks at.
• Shorten headers. "Customer Email Address" can be "Email".
• Split a wide report into two logical tables, each with the key column repeated.
• Run Clean CSV or Excel Data to strip empty rows and columns that quietly widen the page.

Multiple sheets

By default every sheet is included, each starting on a new page with its name as a heading. If you only want the summary, name the sheets you want in the Sheets box rather than exporting everything and deleting pages afterwards.

Saving paper

Reports that will be read on screen but printed for a meeting can go through Multiple Pages per Sheet afterwards, which puts two or four pages on one sheet with thin borders. For a twenty page table, that is a noticeable difference at the printer.

Everything runs in your browser, which matters here: sales figures, payroll and customer lists are exactly the kind of data you should not be pasting into an unknown website.