Exploring Office 2007: A Perfect Print Everytime in Excel 2007 Take the Guesswork Out of Printing in Excel Helen Bradley
There's a scenario that occurs across the country every day. You create a complex worksheet and when you try to print it, disaster strikes and your office printer ejects half-printed pages at an alarming rate.
To save your sanity – and some trees – take a few minutes before you press the Print button to ensure that the worksheet is ready for printing, that it will be easy to collate, and that your audience will be able to read the resulting output easily.
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Print Preview
Before you print, preview the print job. Tens of thousands of sheets of paper could be saved by this simple technique. The print preview dialog shows the number of pages that will print in the bottom left of the screen. If this is extraordinarily high then troubleshoot the problem before pressing the print button. This could indicate a simple problem such as the worksheet printing two sheets wide instead of one or something more complex — a cell with something in it somewhere well out of the way of the data on the sheet, for example.
When you print a worksheet Excel prints everything on it, so if you have a rogue cell buried deep in the sheet even if it only has a space in it, Excel will print everything up to and including this cell, resulting in sheets of wasted paper. If you check the number of pages that will print, you will see you have a problem and will have time to fix it.
To locate and delete a cell that is causing excessive pages to print try deleting rows and columns between the bottom of your data and the end of the worksheet. Another option is to select the data area before selecting Print and then choose to Print the Selection from the Print dialog.
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Page Setup Options
In the Print Preview dialog click the Page Setup icon to configure the way your worksheet prints. On the Page tab you can select Landscape or Portrait orientation — some worksheets can print on a single sheet of landscape paper where they may require two sheets in portrait orientation.
This tab also has a tool for shrinking or expanding the worksheet for printing. To do this, click Adjust to and then set the percentage to increase or decrease the worksheet size.
The Fit To option lets you preset how many pages wide and/or tall the worksheet will print. So, for example, if your worksheet is just a bit too wide to print one sheet wide, you can reduce by selecting Fit to and then type 1 in the Pages wide box. Delete the figure in the Tall box and Excel will reduce the width of the printed area to one page wide but use as many pages as it needs to print the full length of the worksheet.
You can also specify the number of pages tall leaving the number of pages wide blank if you want to limit the vertical size of the printed copy but if you're flexible as to its width. These options are often better choices than trying to specify exactly how many pages wide and tall you want the printed document to be.
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Set Your Margins
Use the Margins tab to set the margins on the page and to center the printout horizontally and vertically between these margins. In addition to setting the margins by typing values into the boxes you can also set them in the Print Preview area. To do this, click the Show Margins button to see the margin markers on the preview.
Use the margin markers to adjust the margins to a smaller size and use the column markers to adjust the column widths without needing to return to the worksheet to do this. You may find the margins tool in the Print Preview gives better visual feedback as to how the margins will affect the final printed copy than other options.
The Header/ Footer tab in the Page Setup dialog lets you configure headers and footers for the worksheet. You can specify, for example, a different odd and even page header or a different header or footer for the first page of the document.
From the Header dropdown list you can select one of a range of headers that are built in to Excel or click the Custom Header area and create your own. Before you create your own header select a built-in header that is close to the type of header you want to create then click Custom Header and customize the options in the dialog rather than building the entire header from scratch.
Use the Sheet tab in the Page Setup dialog to control the printing order for a large document — you can print Down, then Over or Over, then Down. Choosing the right option may make it easier to collate a large worksheet later on.
You can also select to print in black and white, print row and column headings (the letters and numbers), or turn gridlines on or off. Even if gridlines show on your worksheet they will not print unless you enable the checkbox on this tab.
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Special Printing Options
Use the Print Area option to configure a specific area of the worksheet to print — by default Excel prints everything on the current worksheet, but you can select a subset of the data if desired using this feature. The Rows to repeat at top, and Columns to repeat at left options are a 'must have' for a worksheet that prints over a series of pages. These options ensure that the rows and/or columns that you select are printed on every sheet of the printed document.
This lets you pick up any sheet of paper from the printed worksheet and see the column and row headings appropriate to this data. Without this information, a single sheet from a printout may well be incomprehensible.
However, in Print Preview mode you cannot configure either the print area or columns and row titles. You must exit Print Preview and choose Page Layout > Print Titles and then select the area of the worksheet to print and/or the Rows and Columns to repeat. You can click the Print Preview button in the dialog to view the worksheet once you have made your choice but you must configure the print area and titles first.
