Forum Discussion
Export mixed text and tabular Excel to PDF
I have a sheet that I need to export from Excel to PDF. The sheet contains text and tabular data. Ideally, I'd like large bold text to export as heading tags, text as paragraph tags, and the tabular data as a table. Currently, any group of cells containing data that are surrounded with blank cells export as a table, even if they don't contain what a human would consider tabular data. I haven't selected the tabular data and chosen Import > Table. I'm not sure if that would help or not.
How can I export mixed text and tabular data from Excel and have it be tagged as desired in the resulting PDF?
You can export mixed text and tabular Excel data to PDF directly using Excel’s ‘Save As’ or ‘Export’ option. Just adjust the print area first so both text and tables are properly aligned, then choose PDF format. If formatting is important, using ‘Print to PDF’ after setting page layout usually gives better results.
4 Replies
Hello B-Love,
Excel’s PDF export is mostly layout-based, so separate cell ranges are often tagged as tables. Excel has limited control over heading and paragraph tags in PDFs.
Using real Excel Tables for tabular data may help, but if you need reliable accessibility tags, Word usually produces better tagged PDFs than Excel.
Microsoft docs:
Excel PDF AccessibilityYou can export mixed text and tabular Excel data to PDF directly using Excel’s ‘Save As’ or ‘Export’ option. Just adjust the print area first so both text and tables are properly aligned, then choose PDF format. If formatting is important, using ‘Print to PDF’ after setting page layout usually gives better results.
I'm currently using Excel's 'Save As.' The sheet consists of a section of tabular data, plus areas of information about the author, the data, etc. that are not suited to being in a table. I want the PDF to be tagged so as to be accessible to screen reader users. I want to know if I can export from Excel to PDF without everything being tagged as a table.
That's what I'm doing, but all content is exported as tables, whereas there is only one area of tabular data. I want it to be correctly tagged without requiring manual retagging.
