When it comes to organizing, structuring, and formatting data for everyday report presentations and report-sharing scenarios, Excel is decisively the world’s go-to spreadsheet solution. And that’s for good reason – Excel’s extensive and endlessly updated features are perfect for most of our manual data manipulation needs, allowing us to quickly generate stylish rows and columns with slick graphs and other forms of visuals. The open-XML .XLSX format also transitions nicely into plain text formats like CSV, making it equally straightforward to export and upload Excel’s tabular data to a broader range of compatible applications. Despite its myriad features and format conversion fluidity; however, document compatibility concerns are always lurking when we look to share Excel report content with the broadest possible audiences.
Of course, we don’t have to look very far to find a global, standardized solution to this long-standing challenge. Where fully formatted and finished data reports are concerned, PDF represents the ideal export format, owing largely to its universal compatibility and secure design. Excel and CSV documents converted to PDF format are viewable on any browser, and these PDFs can be formed as vector or raster files depending on the document creator’s personal preference.