What's actually happening
Excel doesn't have a page. A worksheet is an unbounded grid, and printing is the moment it has to be cut into paper-sized rectangles. Excel does that by walking across your columns until the next one wouldn't fit the printable width, then starting a new page — and it does this silently.
So when your 14-column table becomes a PDF where columns A–H are on page 1 and I–N are on page 4 (because rows broke too), nothing went wrong. The default is simply 100% scale on portrait A4 with 0.75in margins, which gives you about 6.7 inches of usable width.
Fix 1: Scale to Fit → Width: 1 page
This is the single setting that solves most cases. On the Page Layout tab, in the Scale to Fit group, set Width to 1 page and leave Height on Automatic. Excel shrinks the whole sheet until every column fits one page width, while rows continue to flow onto as many pages as they need.
Do not set Height to 1 page as well unless you genuinely want the whole sheet on one sheet of paper — that's what produces the four-point text people complain about.
Fix 2: Switch to landscape
Landscape A4 gives you roughly 11.7 inches of paper versus 8.3 in portrait — about 40% more width. Combined with Fix 1, it usually means little or no shrinking is needed at all. Page Layout → Orientation → Landscape.
Fix 3: Narrow the margins
Page Layout → Margins → Narrow drops each margin from 0.75in to 0.25in, recovering a full inch of width. It's not much on its own, but it's often the last inch you need.
Fix 4: Set an explicit print area
A single stray value in column BF makes Excel consider your sheet 58 columns wide, and Scale to Fit will then shrink everything to nothing trying to accommodate it. Select the range you actually want, then Page Layout → Print Area → Set Print Area.
Press Ctrl+End to see where Excel thinks your data ends. If it jumps somewhere unexpected, that's your culprit — delete those rows and columns entirely (select, right-click, Delete, not just clear contents) and save.
Fix 5: Stop guessing — use a preview that shows page breaks
Excel's View → Page Break Preview draws the break lines onto the grid, and it is genuinely useful. The converter on this site takes the same idea further: it plans the whole document and shows you the resulting page grid, so you can try landscape, try fit-to-width and watch the page count change before producing anything.
And fix the header while you're there
Once rows break across pages, page 2 onwards has no column labels. Page Layout → Print Titles → Rows to repeat at top → $1:$1 fixes it, and it's the second-most-common complaint after cut-off columns.