Why does Excel split a sheet across pages?
Printing walks left to right in page-width slices, then down. A sheet 18 columns wide on A4 portrait becomes three slices, and the last column of each slice is orphaned from its row labels — the classic unreadable printout.
The fix is not narrower columns, it is scaling: shrink the whole sheet until its width equals the printable width.
What comes across from the workbook?
Number formats exactly as displayed — currency symbols, thousands separators, decimal places, percentages, dates, and negatives in red or brackets. Cell fills and font colors, bold and italic, borders, merged cells, column widths and row heights. Pictures anchored to cells. Hidden rows, columns and sheets stay hidden, as they do when printing from Excel.
Two settings are honored that most converters ignore: a print area, so only the region you meant to print is used, and print titles, so the header row repeats at the top of every page.
What about formulas and charts?
Formula cells print the value Excel last saved with the file, which is what a printed sheet shows. A workbook written by a script that stores formulas without results will show those cells empty — open and save it once in Excel or LibreOffice to fill them in.
Charts, shapes and conditional formatting are not drawn yet. If a chart is the point of the page, export it as an image and place it in a document instead.
How does a CSV differ?
A CSV has no formatting at all — no column widths, no fonts, no merged cells — so it is laid out fresh: a clean table with the header repeated on every page and numbers aligned right.
That makes CSV to PDF the better route when the data comes from an export rather than a designed spreadsheet.