Why Excel cuts off columns when you save as PDF.

You save the client's sheet as a PDF and the table stops at the October column. November, December and the total are not on the page. They might be on page 3, or not in the file at all.

Excel is cutting off columns in your PDF because the sheet is wider than the paper. While you work, the grid runs as far right as your data goes. The page only exists when you print, export or switch to a view that previews it. At export Excel has to fit the whole grid onto a sheet of paper, and the columns that do not fit go to another page, or out of the print entirely.

Why does Excel cut off columns when you save as PDF?

Because a PDF is a printout, and the paper is narrower than the sheet.

At Excel's default width of 8.43 characters, a column set in the classic Calibri 11 font is 64 pixels wide, which prints at about two thirds of an inch. With margins of about three quarters of an inch on each side, a portrait page leaves about 7 inches to print on, on US Letter as on A4. That is room for ten columns.

Take a monthly trend table: one column for the label, one per month, one for the total. In August it has ten columns and fits. In September it has eleven, and the eleventh, the total, is past the edge of the page. Nothing changed in the sheet except that a month went by. If your label column is wider than the default, and it usually is, the table stops fitting earlier in the year.

When a sheet is wider than one page, Excel cuts it into a grid of pages. By default it prints down, then over: every page of the left-hand columns from top to bottom, and only then the pages that hold the columns that did not fit. On a long table, the total column ends up on the last pages of the PDF, after every page of months.

The other cause is a print area. Once a print area is set, only the print area is printed. A print area someone set in March to print a summary still applies in September, and every column added since then falls outside it.

How do you fit all columns on one page when saving as PDF?

On the Page Layout tab, in the Scale to Fit group, set Width to 1 page and leave Height on Automatic. Excel's help page on scaling describes the result: the columns appear on one page, and the rows can run onto as many pages as they need.

Landscape, under Page Layout and Orientation, gives you about 9.5 inches of width on a Letter page instead of 7. The December trend table, fourteen columns, fits at full size.

Clear Print Area, under Page Layout and Print Area, removes a print area that someone set and forgot.

In the PDF save dialog, Options lets you choose which part of the workbook to publish and whether to ignore print areas.

Before you export, open Page Break Preview on the View tab. It shows where each page ends. If a page edge runs through your columns, the PDF will cut them there too.

Why is my Excel PDF so small after fitting it to one page?

Because fitting to one page wide shrinks the text by the same factor as the columns.

The scale is the printable width divided by the width of the sheet. In December the trend table has fourteen columns, about 9.3 inches. On a portrait page with 7 inches to print on, the scale is about 75 percent, and text set at 11 points prints at about 8.3 points. That is small, and still readable.

Put two years side by side and the table has 26 columns, about 17.3 inches. The scale drops to about 40 percent and the same text prints at about 4.4 points. Every column is on the page and nobody can read it.

The setting itself can go as low as 10 percent. Fit to width finds out how small the sheet has to get for every column to fit. It does not tell you what size that leaves the text.

Why is the text inside cells cut off in the PDF?

Because the screen and the printer measure the same font differently.

An older help article from Excel's maker, since retired, explained it: the font metrics used on screen differ from the ones the printer uses, so a column can print at a different width from the one you see. Text that fits a cell on screen with nothing to spare can come out a few characters short on paper. Wrapped text loses its last line the same way when the row height was set by eye.

The fixes that come up in forum threads are small. Widen the column a little past the point where it looks right. Select the rows and use AutoFit Row Height, under Home, Format, so Excel sizes them to their text again. On a thread in a PDF maker's community forum that ran from 2008 to 2022, the person asking had a client waiting on a dozen invoices that day. What worked for them was setting the same print resolution in the PDF printer and in Excel.

Why do you have to fix it again every month?

Because page setup belongs to the sheet. Excel sets orientation worksheet by worksheet, and its own suggestion for reusing a landscape setup is to save the workbook as a template.

If you build the report from a platform export each month, every export is a new file, and it does not start from your template. The scaling, the orientation and the cleared print area do not come along. You set them again, or the client gets the version where November is on page 3.

And the table keeps growing. A setup that was right in August, full size and portrait, is wrong in September, because the sheet gained a column. A report breaks when the spreadsheet changes shape, and a column added every month is a change of shape.

How does Pressentable keep every column on the page?

In Pressentable the page exists before the export does. You build a report on an A4 page, 210mm wide with 16mm margins, which leaves a content column of 178mm. The screen, the PDF and the published page all show that same page.

Pressentable compacts a wide table to fit that column. The table never scrolls and never loses a column. How far it compacts depends on how many columns the table has. Up to six columns, the body text is 13 pixels, about 9.75 points on paper. From seven to ten, the gutters narrow and the text drops to 12 pixels. From eleven up, the table takes the smallest size the type scale has, 11 pixels, about 8.25 points, and the column headings give up their letter spacing. We test it with a twelve-column table split across pages: every page keeps all twelve columns.

The text does not get smaller than that. The December trend table, fourteen columns, takes that smallest size, 8.25 points, about what Excel's fit to width gives it on a portrait page. Add more columns and Excel keeps shrinking, to 4.4 points at 26 columns, while Pressentable keeps the text at 8.25 points and breaks long values across lines inside their cells. Neither belongs in front of a client: 26 columns of figures do not fit legibly across a portrait page.

So the fix that holds is choosing the columns. A table in Pressentable binds to the columns you pick, by name, which makes its width a decision you take in the report, where you can see the page, instead of a percentage you find in the PDF.

The size depends only on the column count, so next month's file gives the same table at the same size as long as it has the same columns. The month the table goes from ten columns to eleven, the text steps down one size, on screen first, where you see it before the client does.

What should you check before the PDF goes to a client?

Count the columns in the PDF and compare them with the sheet. If the total column is missing, look at the last pages before anything else.

Check the page count. A one-page table that comes out as four pages has been cut across and down.

Look at the scale in the page setup. 11 points times that percentage is the size the client will read.

Read the last line of every wrapped cell, in the PDF and not on screen.

The client reports page shows what a report looks like when the page comes first, and the Tidewater Goods quarterly sales review is one built on its A4 page from the start.

Part 1 of 3 on spreadsheets that become PDFs. Part 2 covers page breaks and tables split across pages; part 3, the header row and page numbers on every page.