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This has been a recurring theme for me in the last couple of years, we use Excel to generate a lot of technical equipment schedules as it is much better suited to the task than Word,
However, despite all sorts of dilligent row/column sizing and careful setting of print areas and page breaks, come time to actually pdf the document it is a complete crap shoot as to how it presents the pages, I'm sure (but can't prove it) that it will PDF differently every time even if I don't make any changes to the document.
Have tried 'saving as' pdf, 'exporting' as pdf, and printing using Microsoft 'Print to Pdf', all with the same results.
Spoke to others in the company but I think it's just accepted as a minor inconvenience but I'd swear I've spent half a day on it so far.
Any STW gurus experienced this also?
Ta
I used to have this issue, I don't have any answers though.
I seem to remember copy and pasting excel tables into word, reformatting table sizes in word and then saving the word doc as pdf.
Seemed to be the only way to get a sensible result.
Why would you want to?
If you need a PDF, create a PDF rather than fannying about in Excel. If you need a spreadsheet then what are you converting it to PDF for?
Genuine question, it strikes me that the problem here isn't the conversion, it's the workflow.
Apologies for the obvious…
View > Page Break View
Does that help see what’s going on?
... is the answer here "the business is too tight to buy Adobe Acrobat, they'd rather pay us to spaff man-hours up the wall trying to get round pegs into square holes than have us work with appropriate tools"?
Select what you want to capture.
Print to PDF.
Then you can choose the layout.
I have to often use a reporting excel spreadsheet with multiple worksheet tabs.
The spreadsheet is password protected, so I am unable to make any changes to it.
The only way I have found to handle this is to convert each worksheet into a pdf, (pretty timeconsuming as there can be 10 - 12 pages) save them as individual pdf docs, then create a new pdf joining all the individual pdf's back together again.
Drives me nuts.
Oh yes.
Why would I want to?
Well the client requires the report document signed.
In order to do this will require printing 10 -12 pages......waste of paper and ink, just to sign, scan and bin.
An electronic signature cannot be added to the excel doc as its password protected, so will not allow any changes.
So, conversion to a pdf, and then electronically signed is the only way.
Drives me nuts...
I run a VBA script each time which sets the page up as I want it.
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Why would you want to?
It's a quick workaround to create a series of snapshots of things that are continually updated in a format that is easy to print or show on a projector.
What I do is link all the cells that I want to report into a new sheet set up purely to be saved as a PDF. I just set the print area, manually set page breaks, adjust the margins and formatting, then save it as a PDF and check how it looks. The PDF rarely looks identical to the original spreadsheet, but once it's been finetuned to look ok as a PDF, it doesn't seem to change for me.
Crude workaround, but crude workarounds have worked for me for decades and I'm not gonna change my ways now.
If you need a PDF, create a PDF rather than fannying about in Excel. If you need a spreadsheet then what are you converting it to PDF for?
Um.. interesting question! 117 pages of technical information requiring some very basic formula throughout. Excel seems the natural format to generate this in. I've done it in Word before but you need all the layout and table functionality of excel really.
Not sure how I would create this in PDF, and I need to convert my existing spreadsheet into PDF for the sake of issuing it to contractors etc. to go out to market and price it, issuing excel is usually frowned upon due to file sizes/uploading protocol etc.
“the business is too tight to buy Adobe Acrobat, they’d rather pay us to spaff man-hours up the wall trying to get round pegs into square holes than have us work with appropriate tools”
Not sure, as above, I think Excel is the appropriate tool for creating the document, but we want to issue it in a lower file size/'read only' format. Some cursory googling suggested the issue exists in Adobe Pro as well (which really makes me think the issue lies within Excel).
Select what you want to capture.
Print to PDF.
Then you can choose the layout.
Yeah, this doesn't work. Each page is technically set up the same, i.e. the page breaks are set for A4 in portrait, all margins are set up the same, all print areas are set within the boundaries of the page breaks (e.g. print area is always within the page break). For consistency and appearances I can't scale each page differently to fit (although out of desperation this is what I'm now doing) as this creates noticeable differences from page to page.
Um.. interesting question! 117 pages of technical information requiring some very basic formula throughout. Excel seems the natural format to generate this in. I’ve done it in Word before but you need all the layout and table functionality of excel really.
Embedded Excel objects in a word doc any use?
Embedded Excel objects in a word doc any use?
I seem to remember copy and pasting excel tables into word, reformatting table sizes in word and then saving the word doc as pdf.
Yes, am beginning to think setting up a word doc is the way forward, if it guarantees consistent appearance once printed/PDFd.
Doesn't help me this time but worth remembering for next I think 👍
we want to issue it in a lower file size/’read only’ format.
Protect the sheet and zip it?
I think I'd have to see what you're doing first-hand to come up with a more robust solution, but I can't help but think that there must be a better way of doing it than cocking about with filetype conversions.
Perhaps a longshot, but check the 'print quality' dpi setting per sheet are all the same (it's under Page Setup options).
Do what zhols2 says.
I also set the source, the master spreadsheet and all the created PDFs to save into subfolders based on various cell values.
I also have Acrobat but run all these using VBA in Excel.
No one else set print areas and print page sizes ? It's always worked for me -the blue box just multiplies with each additional page and if you make it wider your text gets smaller...
As for using pdfs writer. Your kidding right ?
I use Excel a fair bit of calc work then pdf the outputs into pdf for the field guys folders so they can't **** with it but can see all the inputs on the pre job planning . Before dumping the source copy in there to so they can modify till their hearts content but the pdf is a record of how the job was planned.
Sounds similar to the ops task.
I have pdf writer- it's nice if all I want to do is make pretty pictures.
Or get an eSignature but even then I usually end up using visio for my pretty pictures and print pdfing them
Password protecting an excel file.....isn't that a bit like closing a door and not locking it.
This may or may not help but it might be worth checking the default printer and paper size. We found that after using a label printer and not changing it back it messed up the pdf layout.
This may or may not help but it might be worth checking the default printer and paper size. We found that after using a label printer and not changing it back it messed up the pdf layout.
Good point. If you have Windows set to move your default printer each time you print to something else then that might mess it up. I normally find setting the print area (as you are doing) and the export to pdf (as you are doing) works the most reliably so it is difficult to see what else might be happening. So I would try switching off the 'allow Windows to manage my default printer' thing
Paper sizes and default printers - good suggestions but have checked all those settings.
DPI - interesting, about the one setting I hadn't checked!
It seems to occur AFTER print preview, and wierdly, once you've laboriously check all e.g. 116 pages in the preview and then hit print, THAT'S when it starts dicking about and chopping off rows at the bottom and sticking them on a new page. Although this should increase page count it still prints the original 116 pages, so you end losing pages at the end as well 😖😖
Screw it. We don't have time to QA anything these days anyway and when we inevitably get crucified for our failings on this one the quality of our PDFs is likely to be near the bottom of the list 🙄