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I am trying to print multiple sheets from the same Excel workbook into ONE PDF file. But it frequently prints them separately or only the first sheet.

I selected all the sheets and made them have the same page setup. I am working on Tiger and from the Print dialogue, I click on the left-hand bottom button, "Save PDF" and from there I choose "Save PDF-X".

Anyone have another solution for me?

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    For those using Excel on Windows: on a Mac, the print dialog always has an option to save as PDF as well. As such, I guess it doesn't really matter that the question asker needs PDF; the question could probably also read "How to print multiple Excel sheets in one go?", regardless whether it is really printed on paper, or "printed" to another format.
    – Arjan
    Jan 25, 2010 at 15:38

7 Answers 7

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Select Multiple sheets using Ctrl and then print using pdf writer to get one single file vijay

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Just print the excel sheets into separate PDF files and join them using Adobe Acrobat Professional, if you have it. If not, don't sweat it: there's the brilliant open source PDF toolkit. Here's a short tutorial explaining how combine multiple PDFs.

It's very simple:

pdftk sheet1.pdf sheet2.pdf cat output sheets_all.pdf

Note that you can use wildcards and that the order of input determines the page ordering.

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  • Thank you, this is very helpful, but I am actually looking for a more permanent solution/fix. I print quotes to PDF everyday and need this to work better.
    – Anriëtte Myburgh
    Jan 25, 2010 at 12:44
  • All I can really think of is making a fairly generic batch file using wildcards. The other extreme is writing a PHP/PEAR based exporter: there are well-established packages for reading XLS files and writing PDF files, but that would be seriously overkill.
    – Paul Lammertsma
    Jan 25, 2010 at 14:58
  • Indeed, it's not the solution. But for the archives: for joining PDF documents one can easily use Preview as well. Just open one PDF document, make Preview show its sidebar, and then drag another on top of the existing thumbnail in the sidebar. (Ensure not to drag it below or above the existing thumbnail in the sidebar; you really must drag it on top of the existing thumbnail.) After dropping it, the thumbnail will become a comb bound booklet, which can be expanded or collapsed into a single thumbnail in the sidebar as well. Expand it and drag the thumbnails to reorder if needed.
    – Arjan
    Jan 25, 2010 at 15:33
  • @Arjan Thanks, I tried that, but it is specific to Preview on Leopard or later and I was using Preview on Tiger.
    – Anriëtte Myburgh
    Apr 12, 2010 at 13:53
  • There might be an Apple Script solution out there that combines printing from Excel and PDF toolkit into a single click of a button, but I'm not familiar enough with Apple Script. Perhaps shoot a question on Stack Overflow and somebody can give you something that you can simply plug.
    – Paul Lammertsma
    Apr 13, 2010 at 0:22
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Select the sheets you want in your pdf file (make sure you print preview / set print areas in each sheet that you want to print) and "save as" pdf. Makes a pdf file with all selected worksheets.

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I tried multiple times to give the two separate sheets the same page margins and page properties, but it didn't help me one bit.

I fixed this with an Automator task that took me quite a while to work out, but once it worked, it helped me a lot.

Thanks for all the answers, though I really did specify in my question that I did do all the suggested solutions before posting.

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  • Actually, this seems about as good as Automator. Does it just bring up all the PDFs, or actually combine them? I'm curious how it worked out.
    – Paul Lammertsma
    Apr 13, 2010 at 0:25
  • What happened was the quotes always contained 2 pages, the first one being always the same. So I just printed the second one as PDF to the Desktop. Selected both on the Desktop and right clicked -> Folder Actions -> Combiine PDFs (my custom task). It takes the files and sorts them alphabetically (declining in my case) and then combines the PDF's and saves it to a new file on the Desktop.
    – Anriëtte Myburgh
    Apr 13, 2010 at 5:53
  • Good you found a solution. Please share the main details about that Automator task then?
    – Arjan
    Apr 17, 2010 at 9:41
  • The whole of the Automator task is described in the comment just above your's.
    – Anriëtte Myburgh
    Apr 19, 2010 at 5:55
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As Paul suggested, you could join them together after printing, f.e. also using pdfsam. As an alternative you can use PDFCreator which does support to create a query of documents and join them together.

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  • PDFCreator is Windows-only (and probably would not add much functionality to a Mac).
    – Arjan
    Jan 25, 2010 at 15:40
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Is there any kind of "options" button in the Save As dialogue? On Excel 2007 / Windows the Save As pdf dialogue has an options button which then allows you to save only the selection, the active sheet, the selected sheets, the whole workbook etc. I have no idea if this is available on your version of Office for Mac.

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When saving the doc, selection option and all workbook instead of active sheet

  • Select and Drag all the PDFs into preview.
  • Select all in sidebar.
  • Print and Save As PDF.
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  • I did that as well, but it still just gives me separate PDF's instead of one PDF with multiple pages in it.
    – Anriëtte Myburgh
    Apr 19, 2010 at 5:59

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