How to export spreadsheet to pdf with some cells in color

I have a spreadsheet in which some cells appear in color (e.g., negative numbers). When I export it to PDF, however, all text is black. How can I retain the color formatting?

I’m using LO Portable 7.0 on Windows 7 64-bit.

Have you got View > Value highlighting turned on? Those colours don’t print. Turn it off to see actual colours that will be exported, or File > Print Preview

No problem with

Version: 7.1.1.2 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: fe0b08f4af1bacafe4c7ecc87ce55bb426164676
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 5.3; UI render: default; VCL: kf5
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

on openSUSE Leap 15.2 (regardless whether color derives from Format or Conditional Formatting


> When I export it to PDF

Are you using File -> Export As PDF.. or are you in fact printing to a PDF printer to create the .pdf file?

Thanks to both of you for your help. I figured a few things out; see my answer below.

In Adobe Reader,click Edit > Preferences. In the dialog that opens click on Accessibility and untick Replace Document Colours. Cheers, Al

Bottom line:

When I exported a spreadsheet with colors to PDF, and opened it in Adobe, it appeared in b/w, no colors.

Then I opened the same PDF in Sumatra, and there were the colors.

FLOSS software rocks!