How to send a spreadsheet that looks right

You send an invoice as .xlsx. The other side opens it in a different Excel version, on a smaller screen, with different fonts installed, and sees three columns pushed onto a second page with a header floating alone. Nothing was corrupted — spreadsheets simply have no fixed layout until something decides where the pages end.

When to send PDF instead

• Anything final: invoices, reports, quotes, timesheets. The recipient needs to read it, not recalculate it.
• Anything that goes to a printer or into a document archive.
• Anything with formulas you would rather not expose. A PDF carries the values, not the logic behind them.

Keep sending the spreadsheet itself only when the other person will actually edit it.

Set the print area first

This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that decides how the PDF looks:

1. In Excel, select the range you want and set Print Area.
2. Choose Landscape if the table is wider than it is tall.
3. Set Fit to 1 page wide — this alone fixes most split-column complaints.
4. Repeat the header row on every page (Print Titles) if the table runs long.

The converter honours all of it, because these settings are stored in the file.

Convert

Drop the file in and download the PDF. This one runs on our servers — LibreOffice does the layout, the same engine a desktop would use — and the source file is deleted the moment the result is ready.

The same applies to presentations: each slide becomes a page, fonts and all.

Sending several documents

If the invoice, the timesheet and the cover letter are three files, merge them into one PDF before sending. One attachment is harder to lose than three.

A PDF is not protection. Anyone can copy text out of it. If the numbers are confidential, password-protect the file as well.