Excel to
PDF.

Why convert XLSX to PDF?

• To finalize. A PDF won't recalc, won't be edited by accident, and won't break if the recipient is on a different Excel version.
• To submit. Finance, audit, and grant-submission pipelines almost always want PDF, not XLSX.
• To print. Excel's print preview is famously unhelpful; the PDF is a deterministic preview you can flip through before sending it to paper.
• To share with non-Excel users. PDF opens on every phone, tablet, and browser; XLSX needs Excel, LibreOffice, or Google Sheets.

What's preserved

Formatly converts XLSX to PDF via a headless LibreOffice Calc pipeline — the same backend Excel itself uses for its "Save As PDF" feature on macOS. Here's what survives the trip:

• Fonts and number formatting. Standard system fonts render exactly; $1,500.00, 15.0%, and 2026-05-23 all keep their displayed form rather than reverting to the underlying serial number.
• Merged cells and cell borders. A merged cell renders as a single span across the right region. Border colors, weights, and dashes carry through.
• Conditional formatting. Data bars, color scales, and highlight-if rules are evaluated against the current cell values and the resulting fill colors are baked into the PDF.
• Charts. Bar, line, pie, scatter, and combo charts render as vector graphics. Labels, axis titles, and legends all keep their text.
• Formulas. Evaluated as their last cached values — the same numbers you'd see in Excel today. If the file was generated programmatically and never opened, see the formula caveat below.
• Multi-sheet workbooks. Every visible sheet in tab order. Hidden sheets are skipped. Page breaks between sheets are honored.

What doesn't always survive: VBA macros (PDFs don't run code), comments tied to cells (rendered as an annotation or dropped depending on settings), and any custom add-in rendering. Charts that depend on a live external data source are baked at their current state — no auto-refresh in a PDF.

How it works

1. Open the converter. Go to the Formatly converter — no signup required.
2. Drop your XLSX files. Drag and drop one or more Excel spreadsheets into the upload box (up to five files, 20 MB each).
3. Choose PDF as the output. Pick PDF from the dropdown; conversion runs through headless LibreOffice and preserves fonts, merged cells, conditional formatting, charts, and multi-sheet layouts.
4. Convert and download. Click Convert; download links appear for each PDF as it finishes. Output is watermark-free with every sheet included.

Good for

• Sending a quarterly report where the numbers shouldn't be tweakable.
• Archiving a model snapshot before the formulas get edited further.
• Submitting financial statements, invoices, or grant budgets.
• Printing a multi-tab workbook with consistent page layout.

FAQ

Will my charts and embedded images be preserved? Yes. The conversion runs through a headless LibreOffice pipeline, the same one Excel itself uses on macOS for its Save As PDF option. Charts (bar, line, pie, scatter, combo), inline images, and shapes all render in the PDF with their colors and labels intact.

What about merged cells, conditional formatting, and cell colors? All preserved. Merged cells render with their value spanning the right region. Conditional-formatting rules (data bars, color scales, highlight-if rules) are evaluated and the resulting cell colors carry through. VBA-driven custom formatting is not.

How does it handle very wide sheets that don't fit a page? By default, LibreOffice scales each sheet to fit the page width. A sheet 30 columns wide will be shrunk so all 30 fit on one landscape A4 page rather than spilling onto multiple pages per row. If your spreadsheet defined a custom print area, that takes precedence.

Are all sheets included in the PDF? Yes. Every sheet in the workbook is rendered, in tab order, as one or more pages in the resulting PDF. Hidden sheets are skipped. This is one of the main reasons to pick PDF over CSV for a multi-sheet workbook — CSV can only carry the first sheet.

Is the XLSX to PDF conversion free? Yes. No signup, no watermark, no time-limited trial. Free for personal and commercial use, up to five XLSX files per upload at 20 MB each.

Related

• XLSX → CSV → when you want the data, not the layout
• CSV → XLSX → go the other way, from plain rows into Excel
• DOCX → PDF → the Word-document sibling
• CSV → PDF → a lighter version for plain tabular data