Printing an entire Excel workbook to a single PDF file

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Votes: 11

Comments: 11

If you have multiple individual sheets within your Excel workbook, when you try to create a PDF and choose to print the Entire Workbook, each sheet will be saved as a different PDF file. This happens because of the way Microsoft Excel sends the print job. Excel assumes that all your individual sheets have different page setups, so it sends them as multiple print-jobs.

n order to have all the individual sheets printed within a single PDF file (not multiple PDFs) you need to set the same page setup options for all of them (page setup in Excel modifies the print size of the resulting file, so for example if you set the page layout to landscape in Excel, the printed page will be landscape but your original Excel file will still maintain the same view).

To set the same Page Setup options for all individual Excel sheets:

Open the Excel workbook
Right-click the tab for any of the sheets you have in your workspace (by default they sheet tabs are named Sheet1, Sheet2, ...)
Choose the Select all Sheets option (which will select all the sheets in your workspace, you can tell they're selected if all the sheet tabs have a white background like an active sheet tab would have)
Go to File->Page Setup, select the options you want for the resulting printed pages (it's important that the Print Quality is the same for all pages) and press OK so that Excel will record the fact that all pages have the same print settings. It's important to press the OK button even if you don't change anything, because this will "tell" Excel that all the sheets have the same page setup options.
Go to File->Print Preview and see if you like the way the pages will show when printed to PDF. If you don't have any changes to the printing options go to File->Print, select the Entire Workbook option under Print What and novaPDF from the Printer name section and click OK to create the PDF file
novaPDF will ask you where to save the PDF and (if set so) it will open the PDF when it's created.

Applies to:

novaPDF (all editions)
Microsoft Excel 2007
Microsoft Excel 2003
Microsoft Excel 2002
Microsoft Excel 2000

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Comments

26 Jun, 2009 | XVE (Belgium)

Thanks. You really helped me a lot !

17 Jun, 2009 | MS

Thanks. I was trying to figure out why Excel was sending two jobs, and this was it.

15 Jun, 2009 | Reggie

You are marvelous! So simple an answer but yet so elusive for those of us not in the know.

23 May, 2009 | Russell

I use another PDF printer and I still found this advice to be fantastic!! You are a legend.

24 Apr, 2009 | James

Excellent information. I was so frustrated that I pulled out my hair, but I thank you for saving my life!

06 Feb, 2009 | Opa

This is awesome, thanks!

05 Feb, 2009 | Annapoorani.m

Thankyou very much...

22 Jan, 2009 | Gava

you saved me! MWAH!!

08 Jan, 2009 | Colin

Thank you.

I was having this problem when printing to pdf and as a standard print job from Excel.

Your solution has fixed this for me and saved a load of time trying to figure it out!

27 Oct, 2008 | Lynn Owens

THANK you so much for this info! Couldn't figure out what happened to my workbook... someone had changed the dpi.

30 Sep, 2008 | Courval

I wanted to print a workbook with 4 sheets all in one PDF. The first sheet was in Portrait format and the last 3 landscape. This is what I have done and it works:

1. Set Print Area for each sheet
2. Set Page Set up options for each sheet individually (in particular in this case orientation [portrait / landscape] and Fit to 1 page by 1 page [in my case]
3. Follow the direction in the article linked to above and select Page Set up for all worksheets
4. Set the Paper Size and Print Quality for all sheets

The problem I was having is that one sheet had a print quality of 300 dpi while the others had 600 dpi. This was generating 2 different PDFs that would overwrite each other. The above solved my problem and resulted in 1 PDF with different page orientations.

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