Why Excel cuts off columns when you save as PDF

Saving a workbook as PDF in Excel is printing it. Excel lays the sheet out on pages of the chosen paper size at the chosen scale, and anything that does not fit across one page goes to a later page, printed after every page of the columns before it, or is left out entirely if it is outside a print area. The fix is almost always one setting: File → Print → No Scaling → Fit All Columns on One Page, with landscape orientation if the sheet is wide. If columns are missing altogether rather than moved, look for a print area.

First, moved or missing?

Scroll to the end of the PDF. If the missing columns are there, on pages after the rest, the sheet was simply wider than the paper and Excel printed it in vertical strips, down first and then across, which is its default page order. If they are nowhere, something told Excel not to print them.

The five causes

The setting that fixes most of it

In File → Print, the last setting under Settings reads No Scaling by default. Change it to Fit All Columns on One Page. Excel shrinks the sheet until its width fits the paper and lets the rows run on to as many pages as they need, which is what almost everybody wants from a wide table. Fit Sheet on One Page also exists; on a long sheet it shrinks the text until it is unreadable, so use it only for a sheet that is nearly a page anyway.

Switch to landscape in the same panel for anything more than about ten columns of ordinary width. The setting is saved with the sheet, so it survives the next save as PDF.

If shrinking to fit makes the text too small, the table is too wide for the paper, and there are two honest answers: hide the columns nobody needs in the PDF, or set Page Layout → Print Titles → Columns to repeat at left, change Page Order to "Over, then down" in Page Setup, and let it print across two pages with the key column on both.

Print areas nobody remembers setting

A print area is stored in the workbook as a defined name, _xlnm.Print_Area, one for each sheet that has one. It is often set once, for one report, and forgotten; then a column is added to the right and it never prints. In Page Break Preview the print area is the part shown white, and everything outside it is grey. Page Layout → Print Area → Clear Print Area removes it. The "Ignore Print Area" option in the Print panel ignores it for a single print without removing it.

Save As PDF against Print to PDF

On Windows, File → Save As → PDF and File → Export use Excel’s own PDF writer; choosing Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer goes through the printer driver. Both honour the page setup, but they can paginate slightly differently, because the driver’s printable margins are not the same as Excel’s. If one cuts off the last column and the other does not, fit to width rather than fighting a millimetre.

Without Excel

SHEETFED turns an .xlsx into a PDF in the browser tab. It reads the sheet’s values as Excel last worked them out, number formats, fonts, fills, borders, merged cells, column widths and hidden rows and columns, and by default fits each sheet to the width of the page, so a wide sheet is scaled down rather than cut into strips. Paper size, orientation, gridlines and margins can each follow the sheet or be chosen.

Two things to know before relying on it. It honours the sheet’s print area, as Excel does, so a stale print area leaves columns out here too; clear it in the workbook first. And it sets the sheet in its own font, DejaVu Sans, which is wider than Excel’s own Calibri or Aptos, so it widens a column rather than let a number turn into ####; the PDF will not match Excel’s pagination line for line. Charts, pictures and conditional formatting do not come across, and the page says so.

Choosing the sheets and making the PDF is free. Saving it is part of OBSCURA Pro, or US$1 to save from one tool for a day.