How to Convert Excel to PDF in Power Automate
Exporting Excel to PDF is a great way to preserve the layout of our spreadsheets. In Power Automate, we can handle Excel to PDF conversions easily before sending or storing our data anywhere, eliminating the need for any downstream manual intervention in the PDF exporting process.
In this quick Power Automate walkthrough, we’ll learn how to convert Excel documents to PDF using the Cloudmersive Document Conversion connector. We’ll generate consistent, reliable results this way, and we’ll end up with accessible, text-based PDF versions of our original spreadsheet data.
Walkthrough
We’ll start by creating a manually triggered, instant cloud flow. This option makes the most sense for testing our flow with a single Excel document.
Next, we’ll use a Get file content action to retrieve an Excel document from our file system. I’ll be using the SharePoint iteration of this action to retrieve an example “Company Expenses” spreadsheet.
Next, we’ll add a new action and type “Cloudmersive” into the search bar. We’ll then look for the Cloudmersive Document Conversion connector from the list of options below.
We’ll now click “See more” to view the actions list, and from here, we’ll search for an action titled Convert Excel XLSX Spreadsheet to PDF.
We’ll notice these actions all have a “premium” tag next to them. We will need a premium Power Automate license to access Cloudmersive connectors, but we can use them at no additional cost with a free Cloudmersive API key. We can get a free API key by creating a free account on the Cloudmersive website.
After we select this action, we’ll use our free API key to create our connection, and we’ll begin configuring our request parameters.
We’ll enter our spreadsheet file bytes in the first parameter, and we’ll provide a file name in the second parameter (note — we don’t need our real file name for this action to work correctly).
In the final step of our flow, we’ll add a Create file action and save our new PDF to another folder in our system. I’ll be saving my file in a OneDrive for Business folder.
After we save and test our flow, we’ll find our new PDF document in the folder we specified.
We could easily expand this flow to convert entire folders of Excel documents to PDF — or we could use this action to convert Excel to PDF directly before sharing those documents in an email. The possibilities are endless!
