Checklist
Eleven things to set before you export — print area, page breaks, repeated headers, wide tables, and the printer setting that quietly moves every break. All of it works in plain Excel. Nothing here needs our software, and no email is needed to read it.
01
A print area someone set months ago is the single most common cause of data quietly missing from a PDF. Excel does not warn you. It just exports less than you have.
If you never wanted one, clearing it is the right answer — Excel then exports the used range.
02
This is the two-second version of the check nobody does. It catches the column someone added to the right of the print area last quarter.
03
"Fit sheet on one page" is what makes a financial report come out at four-point type. Constraining width but letting height run is almost always what you meant.
04
Page two of a table with no column headings is unreadable, and it is the most common complaint about spreadsheet PDFs that people never trace back to a setting.
05
Automatic breaks fall wherever the paper runs out, which cuts a total off its rows and splits a section in half.
Insert Page Break from the Breaks menu does the same thing without the dragging.
06
Page geometry — paper size, the unprintable margin, and therefore where every automatic break falls — comes from the active printer driver. Windows repoints the default at whatever printed last, so a file that paginated correctly on Friday can paginate differently on Monday with nobody touching it.
This is also the answer to "why did page-break lines appear in my workbook overnight".
07
Trailing blank or near-blank pages are almost never a PDF problem. They are Excel remembering cells you once formatted or pasted into and still counting them as used.
08
These are sheet settings, not workbook settings. A workbook where sheet 1 is landscape and sheets 2–6 are portrait produces a PDF that looks like two documents stapled together.
09
A table wider than the page has exactly three honest outcomes: shrink it, split it across pages, or turn the page sideways. Excel picks silently, and its pick is usually "shrink until illegible".
10
A missing font gets substituted, the substitute has different metrics, row heights recalculate, and every page break moves. This is why the same workbook paginates differently on two machines.
The same mechanism silently resizes charts anchored to cells — Format Chart Area → Properties → "Don’t move or size with cells" pins them.
11
Print Preview renders from the same assumptions that produced the problem. The exported file is the only thing that tells you the truth, and it takes fifteen seconds to check.
Want it on paper? Print this page — it is laid out to come out clean, which would be an embarrassing thing for this particular page to get wrong.
Every item above is worth knowing, and on one important workbook it is fifteen minutes well spent. On forty workbooks every month it is the reason the job eats an evening.
CrazySmartPDF does this part for you: it re-lays out each sheet so a row is never split across a page break, keeps a wide table readable rather than crushing it, and checks the finished PDF for blank and clipped pages. There is a free single-file web converter that needs no install and no Excel, and a free Windows download that batches a whole folder in one pass.
The checklist above is yours already — no address needed. If you want the next one, leave an email.
