Introduction

PDF documents are widely being used as a standard format of exchanging documents between organizations, government sectors and common users etc. So, it may also be required by the developers to convert their Excel files into PDF documents. Realizing this possible requirement, Aspose.Cells has added the support of converting Excel files to the PDF documents to facilitate its users. In this topic, we will see that how can this conversion be done.

Converting Excel to PDF

To convert Excel files to PDF documents, developers also need Aspose.Pdf (another excellent component by Aspose). Aspose.Cells can work with Aspose.Pdf to convert a spreadsheet to a Pdf document. Both Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Pdf development teams are working hard to enhance the Excel to PDF conversion and support as many features of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as possible. Please follow the steps below to perform this conversion:

• Instantiate an object of Workbook class by calling its empty constructor
• Do your desired work on the spreadsheet using the API of Aspose.Cells
• Once you finish working on spreadsheet, call Save method of the Workbook class to save your spreadsheet work. But, the file format should be in XML and select AsposePdf (a pre-defined value) from the FileFormatType enumeration. Selecting AsposePdf value from the FileFormatType enumeration will direct the Save method to generate spreadsheet in the XML form compatible to Aspose.Pdf Schema so that Aspose.Pdf can generate PDF document according to the spreadsheet
• After the XML file (containing the spreadsheet content) is created, you can create an object of Pdf class in Aspose.Pdf namespace
• Call the BindXML method of the Pdf object and pass the name of the newly generated XML file (containing the spreadsheet content). BindXML also takes another parameter to accept the name of the XSL file if XSLT is used. But, this is not required by us. So, we can simply pass a null here
• Call Save method of the Pdf class to generate the PDF document

The above steps are implemented below in an example.

Example:

[C#]

 

 

//Instantiate the Workbook object

Workbook workbook = new Workbook();

 

 

//Do something here to work on your spreadsheet

 

 

//Save the document in Aspose.Pdf.Xml format

workbook.Save("MySpreadsheet.xml", FileFormatType.AsposePdf);

 

 

//Read the file in Aspose.Pdf.Xml format into Aspose.Pdf

Aspose.Pdf.Pdf pdf1 = new Aspose.Pdf.Pdf();

 

 

//Bind the XML file (containing spreadsheet data) with the Pdf object

pdf1.BindXML("MySpreadsheet.xml", null);

 

 

//Create the PDF document by calling its Save method

pdf1.Save("MySpreadsheet.pdf");

 

 

[VB.NET]

 

 

'Instantiate the Workbook object

Dim workbook As Workbook =  New Workbook()

 

 

'Do something here to work on your spreadsheet

 

 

'Save the document in Aspose.Pdf.Xml format

workbook.Save("MySpreadsheet.xml", FileFormatType.AsposePdf)

 

 

'Read the file in Aspose.Pdf.Xml format into Aspose.Pdf

Dim pdf1 As Aspose.Pdf.Pdf =  New Aspose.Pdf.Pdf()

 

 

'Bind the XML file (containing spreadsheet data) with the Pdf object

pdf1.BindXML("MySpreadsheet.xml", Nothing)

 

 

'Create the PDF document by calling its Save method

pdf1.Save("MySpreadsheet.pdf")

 

 

[JAVA]

//Instantiate the Workbook object

Workbook workbook = new Workbook();

 

 

//Do something here to work on your spreadsheet

 

 

//Save the document in Aspose.Pdf.Xml format

workbook.save("MySpreadsheet.xml", FileFormatType.ASPOSE_PDF);     

 

 

//Bind the XML file (containing spreadsheet data) with the Pdf object

Pdf pdf = Pdf.bindXML(new FileInputStream("F:\\FileTemp\\dest.xml"));

 

 

//Create the PDF document by calling its Save method

pdf.save(new FileOutputStream("MySpreadsheet.pdf"));

 

Conversion Limitations

There are some limitations of the Excel to PDF conversion. Some formatting settings specified in spreadsheets might be lost when converting to PDF format. Also a few drawing objects might be missing.

We have provided a table given below that lists all those features, which are supported fully or partially when exporting to PDF using Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Pdf. This table also identifies those features that are not supported in this conversion.

Document Element	Attribute	Net Supported	Notes
Alignment		Yes
Background settings		Partially	Only solid background pattern is supported, other patterns are not supported
Border	Color	Yes
Border	Line style	Partially	Only Aspose.Pdf line style types are supported
Border	Line width	Yes
Cell Data		Yes
Comments		No
Conditional Formatting		No
Document Properties		No
Drawing Objects		No
Font	Size	Yes
Font	Color	Yes
Font	Style	Yes
Font	Underline	Partially	Only single underline is supported
Font	Effect	Partially	Only strike through effect is supported
Images		Yes
Hyperlink		Yes
Charts		Partially	Check Supported Charts List
Merged Cells		Partially