Updated October 14, 2026. Written for GridCraft 0.6.1 (what changed since).
Steps
- Open the file. Go to gridcraft.run/editor and drag the .xlsx onto the grid, or use Open… in the title bar's More commands menu. The first visit downloads the app, about 6 MB. A password-protected workbook asks for its password first.
- Set up the page. On the Page Layout tab, pick Orientation, Size and Margins. If only part of the sheet should be in the PDF, select that range and choose Print Area › Set Print Area.
- Check the pages. Open File › Print. The preview on the right shows each page and "Page 1 of N". Tick Fit Sheet on One Page if a few stray columns spill onto a second page.
- Export. Go to File › Export and click Create PDF. Chrome and Edge show a save dialog; Firefox and Safari download the file. The PDF is named after the workbook.
Create PDF exports the sheet you're looking at. For every sheet in one PDF, go to File › Print, switch the scope to Print Entire Workbook and click Print. GridCraft hands the PDF to your browser's print dialog, where you choose Save as PDF (Chrome, Edge) or the PDF option your browser offers as the destination.
Getting the page right
The PDF follows Excel's print rules: GridCraft prints the print area if the sheet has one, otherwise everything used on the sheet, including charts and pictures that sit to the right of the data. That's why a sheet with a chart beside the table often comes out as two pages. These are the controls that change the result:
| Setting | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Print area | Page Layout › Print Area | Limits the PDF to the selected range. Clear Print Area goes back to the whole sheet |
| Orientation | Page Layout › Orientation | Landscape fits wide tables without shrinking them |
| Paper size | Page Layout › Size | Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Executive, A3, A4 or A5 |
| Margins | Page Layout › Margins | Normal, Wide, Narrow, or Custom Margins in inches, including header and footer distance |
| Page breaks | Page Layout › Breaks | Insert a break above or left of the selected cell; Reset All Page Breaks removes yours |
| Gridlines and headings | Page Layout › Sheet Options | Tick Print under Gridlines to draw the cell grid, or under Headings for the A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 labels |
| Header and footer | Insert › Header & Footer | Switches to Page Layout view to type a header; codes such as &P (page) and &N (number of pages) fill in at export |
| Fit to one page | File › Print | Shrinks the whole sheet onto one page |
View › Page Break Preview shows the print range outlined in blue with the page numbers drawn on it, which is the fastest way to see where a table will be cut. Use Fit Sheet on One Page with care on wide sheets: a 20-column table squeezed onto portrait Letter paper gets text too small to read. Landscape plus a print area that drops the helper columns usually reads better.
What ends up in the PDF
GridCraft draws the PDF itself, page by page: cell fills, borders, gridlines if you asked for them, number formats exactly as the cells show them, merged and wrapped cells, conditional formatting, table styles, charts, pictures, shapes and sparklines. Charts are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp when someone zooms in.
The fonts change. The PDF uses the standard PDF fonts every reader has built in, so a sheet set in Calibri or Arial comes out in Helvetica, a serif font becomes Times, and a monospaced one becomes Courier. Bold and italic are kept. Column widths stay as they are on the sheet, so a cell that just fits on screen can look slightly tighter or looser on paper. One export stops at 2,000 pages.
Text the PDF can't carry
Because those standard fonts are not embedded and use the Windows-1252 character set, the PDF can only hold the characters of English and Western European languages. Accented letters such as é, ü, ñ and å come through, and so do €, £, ™ and curly quotes. Everything else turns into a question mark:
- Letters outside Windows-1252, such as Polish ł or Czech ř.
- Greek and Cyrillic text.
- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Devanagari.
The last group has a second problem in the browser: the web build has no fonts for those scripts, so the cells already show empty boxes on screen. The desktop app displays Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Hebrew with your system fonts, but its PDF export has the same character limit, because it uses the same PDF writer. Better font support is on GridCraft's roadmap as "text in every script".
For a sheet in one of those languages, export from LibreOffice Calc (File › Export As › Export as PDF) or from Excel instead. Our guide to free Office alternatives compares the options.
Password-protected workbooks
A workbook encrypted with a password in Excel 2007 or later opens after you type the password, and then exports like any other. Older encryption schemes, such as the RC4 used by some Excel 97-2003 files, are refused with a message; remove the password in the program that set it. Any copy you save from GridCraft has no password, so set it again in Excel if the file needs one.
Sheet protection, the kind that only locks cells against editing, doesn't affect the export at all.
Before you send the PDF
Open the PDF and page through it once, looking for a column cut off at the right edge (set a print area or switch to landscape), a lone row on the last page (Fit Sheet on One Page, or a slightly narrower margin), and a question mark where a name had a special letter. If the PDF needs a figure the sheet doesn't have yet, the Spreadsheet AI panel can write the formula, and opening an XLSX file online covers what else a workbook keeps when you edit it here.