Converting Excel Files to PDF

When converting Microsoft Excel files, as with any other program using the PDFMaker, you’ll want to visit the Adobe PDF menu. As is the case with Word, this menu is installed in Excel when you install Acrobat. When you open the Adobe PDF menu and compare the menu choices with the same menu opened in Word, you see a few differences.

Notice the Mail Merge to Adobe PDF is unique to Word and doesn’t appear in the Excel menu. In Excel you have an additional command for converting an entire workbook. Excel documents can have a single worksheet or many worksheets in a workbook.

If you select the Convert Entire Workbook command, all worksheets in a workbook are converted to PDF. Open the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box by selecting Adobe PDF >> Change Conversion Settings. The Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box opens. Compare Figure below with the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box opened in Word.

All the settings are identical in the Excel Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box as the same dialog box opened from Word with the exception of the last three items:

  • Convert comments to notes. Check this box when you want Excel comments converted to comment notes in the resultant PDF file.
  • Fit worksheet to a single page. Check this box to avoid tiling individual worksheet pages.
  • Prompt for selecting Excel Sheets. Check this box to individually select worksheets in a workbook you want converted to PDF.

To understand a little more about converting Excel workbooks to PDF, follow these steps:

  1. Open an Excel workbook. Try to use an Excel file having several worksheets in a workbook.
  1. Change conversion settings. From the Adobe PDF menu, select Change Conversion Settings. In the Change Conversion Settings dialog box select the check boxes for Add Bookmarks to Adobe PDF and Prompt for selecting Excel Sheets. You can additionally make other choices such as Fit Worksheet to a single page if you like.
  1. Convert to PDF. Click the Convert to Adobe PDF tool or select Adobe PDF >> Convert to Adobe PDF.
  1. Select worksheets. As soon as you make a choice to convert to PDF, a second Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box opens. Because you selected Prompt for selecting Excel Sheets in the first Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box, Acrobat prompts you to select the worksheets you want to convert to PDF.

Click the Add All Sheets button if you want all sheets converted to PDF or individually select the sheets you want to convert and click the Add Sheets button.

  1. View the PDF. If you elected to view the PDF after conversion by selecting the View Adobe PDF result check box in the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box, your file opens automatically in Acrobat.

If you didn’t check the box, open Acrobat and click the Open tool to locate and open your converted document. Click the Bookmarks panel and you should see bookmarks added for each worksheet in the converted workbook.