How to convert a CSV to a formatted PDF table
Drop a CSV in and it renders as a formatted table rather than a wall of comma-separated text. Files with six or more columns are detected as wide and switch to landscape orientation automatically, which is where most free converters produce something unreadable.
Takes about 1 min
Steps
Check the CSV is saved as UTF-8
If accented or non-Latin characters look wrong, the file isn't UTF-8. In Excel, use "CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)" rather than plain CSV — this alone fixes most character problems.
Open the extension and choose Upload Files
Drag the CSV in.
Let the orientation auto-select, or override it
Six or more columns switches to landscape automatically. You can still set it yourself if you'd rather.
Convert
The output is a formatted table with header row and readable columns.
Worth knowing
- Very large CSVs — tens of thousands of rows — can exhaust the memory available to a browser tab, since every row is a table row to lay out. Split into chunks of around 10,000 rows.
- A CSV with headers and no data rows produces a PDF containing just the header row. That's usually a filtered export that matched nothing.
- The conversion renders values as they appear in the file. Formulas were already resolved to values when the CSV was written.
Questions
Why does my CSV come out with strange characters?
The file isn't UTF-8 — it's probably Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1, which is common from older software and database exports. Re-save it as UTF-8, or export from Excel using "CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited)".
My table is cut off on the right. What do I do?
Use landscape, which happens automatically at six or more columns but can be set manually too. For very wide data, Tabloid in landscape gives you considerably more room.