Excel's printing is identical to the printing of documents from other applications in the Office suite. If you are already familiar with printing from any of these applications, you are almost finished with the print features of Excel.
Like all printing components, Excel has its set of "default" settings. That is, when you first open a blank spreadsheet and eventually choose to print, there are already some settings that you may expect to be set for you. It is important to have an understanding of these defaults because you might just like the defaults and won't need to make any adjustments!
The
menu choice of Page Setup will let you make adjustments
in the default setup of the document for printing purposes.
Click on File in the Menu and slide down to highlight Page Setup. When you get the choice you want, click to select.
This will bring up the Page Setup Panel to let you begin making any adjustments to the settings.
The
Page Setup Panel contains four different panels accessed
by clicking on the appropriate tab. In this view, the Page
Tab is open.
You can change the Orientation of the document from Portrait to Landscape.
The Scaling lets you adjust the number of pages required to contain your document. More on this later.
When you are satisfied with the settings on the Page Tab, you could click OK or click on another Tab.
The
Margins tab lets you make adjustments to the way the printer
is going to try to print your document.
Note the default settings for the top, bottom, left and right margins. You may want to adjust these at some time.
If you have a small document that you want centered, you might try using the Center on Page features to get either horizontal or vertical centering (or both). This would be quicker than trying to adjust the margins or editing your document!
You could click OK or select another Page Setup Tab.
The
Header/Footer tab lets you see the place where you can
create Headers and Footers.
Headers and Footers are content you wish repeated on each page of your printout.
A header or footer that might prove useful would be a place to display page numbers for your set of documents.
Remember that headers and footers will take up space on your paper and you should plan accordingly.
If you are finished, you could Click OK or select another Tab.
The final tab is the Sheet Tab. This tab contains some important features.
The
Sheet Tab is the place where you tell Excel whether you
want to print gridlines or not.
Notice the blank box beside Gridlines. This is the default setting.
If you want to display the horizontal and vertical borders of the cells, you will have to put a check in the gridlines box.
We shall use the Print Preview option (discussed in another section)to see what a document might look like if the gridlines have not been turned on.
You
can see from this example that the content of the page has not had
the gridlines turned on.
It might be interesting to also observe that the Next button in the top corner is dark. This would mean that the document will print using more than one page.
More about the Print Preview feature in another session.
If you close the Print Preview window, you will return to your document and see some dotted vertical and horizontal lines. These are visual clues that with the current settings, the page breaks in actual printed pages will fall on the dotted lines. The breaks may be OK or cause you to try to adjust something.
We will now explore how you might get all of your work on a single printed page. You have some choices besides adjusting the column widths and reducing the font size down for all text.
You
remember the margin settings? Perhaps you could achieve
the desired results if you let your document take up more space horizontally
on the paper. This adjustment from the default setting of .75 inch to .25
would add a half-inch to your document on both sides.
You could look at the dotted lines or try the Print Preview again. If the document is still too wide, you have other settings to adjust.
You
could change the paper orientation from Portrait to Landscape.
This would give you several extra inches on the left and right margins.
It could cause a problem with the top and bottom margins.
Perhaps
the easiest way to make sure all of your document fits on one page is using
the Scaling feature found on the Page Tab.
If your document "laps over" the edge of a single page, the Fit
to 1 page will "scrunch" everything smaller until it
fits on a single page. Caution: This could make everything so small it couldn't
be read!
If you choose to use this feature, we strongly suggest you check the output to see if it will still be useful. Generally, this feature works best when just a small amount of "scruch" will put everything on a page. (If all fails, resign yourself that you have a 2-page document!)