Creating Individual PDFs by Worksheet

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 27, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365


Lissa has a workbook that contains multiple worksheets. She would like to create individual PDFs for these worksheets (one PDF per worksheet) with the name of the PDF based on the worksheet's name. She wonders if there is a way to do this in Excel.

There are ways to do it, depending on how much time you want to spend. If this is a "one off" occurrence, you might consider just printing each individual worksheet manually. Or, you could copy each worksheet to its own workbook and then print each workbook to PDF.

These are quite manually intensive, though. (Which is why I said they may be good for only "one off" occurrences.) If you would like something a bit more automatic, you'll want to turn to using a macro to do the PDF files. Here's an example of a short macro that will do the PDF creation for you:

Sub CreatePDFs()
    Dim wks As Worksheet
    Dim sFolder As String
    Dim sTemp As String

    sFolder = ActiveWorkbook.Path & "\"

    sTemp = "Created PDFs for the following worksheets"
    For Each wks In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
        If wks.Visible = xlSheetVisible Then
            sTemp = sTemp & vbCrLf & "   * " & wks.Name
            wks.ExportAsFixedFormat Type:=xlTypePDF, _
              Filename:=sFolder & wks.Name & ".pdf", _
              OpenAfterPublish:=False
        End If
    Next

    MsgBox sTemp
End Sub

Note that the path stored in the sFolder variable is set to whatever path is associated with the active workbook. (If you haven't saved the active workbook yet, then the macro will not run properly.) This path is the folder in which the PDF files are saved. If you want them saved in a different location, just change the value assigned to the sFolder variable.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13570) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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