100 Computer Tips in 100 Days
Tip #90 - Printing Excel Worksheets
Printing should be easy but for some reason folks have a
lot of trouble with it. To help those folks, we’re going to talk about the basics of
printing a worksheet, including changing the orientation, adjusting the
margins, printing gridlines, setting the print area and setting the percent of
magnification for printing and printing multiple sheets at the same time.
When you are in an Excel worksheet and you click the
print option from the File menu, you are sending the entire sheet to the
printer and printing it in a portrait orientation. Clicking on the Page Layout
tab will give you access to the Page Setup options. Click the Margins option to
choose the margins for your document. Click the Orientation option to change
from Portrait to Landscape. The Size option will allow you to change the paper
size. Frequently Excel worksheets are printed on Legal size paper.
Now we come to the Print Area option. As I mentioned, by
default Excel will print the entire rectangular area that has data. If you want
to print only a portion of the worksheet, you need to select the area you want
to print and choose “Set Print Area” from the Print Area option. If you set an
incorrect print area or need to change the print area, select a new area of the
worksheet and choose Set Print Area again. There can only be one print area in
each worksheet.
Now I’m going to skip over to the Print Titles option. Setting
titles is a good idea if your list is multiple pages long or wide and you would
like the column headings on the top or on the left of all of the pages. In the
example, I set Row 1 to print on all of the pages by clicking in the “Rows to
repeat at top” box and then clicking on any cell in row 1. The code to print
row 1 appears in the box. I then clicked in the “Columns to repeat at left” box
and clicked any cell in A column and dragged across to B column. Again the code
was inserted for me.
The Scale To Fit group on the Page Layout tab is really
important if you want the information to print on a specific number of pages
vertically and horizontally. It’s particularly important if the information doesn’t
quite fit on a page but almost does. You can choose “1” in both the Width and
Height boxes and the page will be scaled down below 100%.
The last options are in the Sheet Options group. Here’s
where you can determine if the Gridlines and/or Headings are just visible or if
they will print. Make your choices with a click.
One more tip. When you print, Excel prints the active worksheet.
If you need to print more than one worksheet at the same time you’ll need to
select the worksheets. Remember to use the Ctrl key to select the sheet tabs
for more than one worksheet.
There you have it. Hope this helps when printing in
Excel.
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