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Smart & Easy Software Tips: Printing in Excel-September 2004, #1
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Smart & Easy Software Tips, Tricks & Techniques
September 2004 - Issue 1
Publisher: Dawn Bjork Buzbee mailto:Dawn@SoftwarePro.com
The Software Pro(TM), Microsoft Certified Office Expert
http://www.SoftwarePro.com
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IN THIS ISSUE - Excel: Easy to Expert Printing Tips
1. Customizing the Print Area
2. Quick Print of a Range of Cells
3. The Hidden View-Page Break Preview
4. Set Your Own Page Breaks
5. Print Headings on Every Page
6. Fit to Page
7. Easy Page Setup on Multiple Worksheets
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Save time and avoid frustration with these smart and easy ways to
setup and print your Excel worksheets.
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1. Customizing the Print Area
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By default, an entire worksheet is printed in Excel unless you
indicate a specific print area. To limit the printed area, 1)
highlight the cells you want to print, 2) choose File > Print
Area > Set Print Area. The new print area remains in place until
changed. To clear the current print area, pick File > Print Area
> Clear Print Area.
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2. Quick Print of a Range of Cells
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If you only need to temporarily print a range of cells, just
highlight the range and choose File > Print. Under the category,
Print What (bottom-left corner), pick Selection and choose OK.
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3. The Hidden View-Page Break Preview
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Most Excel users have yet to discover the Page Break Preview,
another great way to setup the print area in a worksheet. Simply
choose View > Page Break Preview. A prompt may appear as a
reminder. (This option is also available from the Print Preview
view).
The visible white area in the Page Break Preview is the print
area which can be adjusted by moving the solid blue boundary
lines. The dashed lines show where page breaks will occur; these
can be moved to adjust and create manual page breaks which
display as solid blue lines. This view is also a handy way to
see how your worksheet breaks out into pages; notice the gray
page labels such as Page 2 in this view.
You can perform all worksheet actions from the Page Break
Preview. I usually change the Zoom (in the upper-right corner)
to 100%. To change back to the previous view, pick View > Normal.
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4. Set Your Own Page Breaks
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Here's another way to control page breaks. Select the row or
column where you want to create a new worksheet page; the break
will appear above the highlighted row or to the left of the
selected column. Next, choose Insert > Page Break. Page breaks
display as dashed lines.
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5. Print Headings on Every Page
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Do you want to print the same rows or columns on every page?
Printing headings is easy with Print Titles. All you
need to do is pick File > Page Setup and choose the Sheet tab.
Under the Print Titles option, choose Rows to repeat at top
and/or Columns to repeat at left. Finally, click into the actual
spreadsheet and highlight the row(s) and/or column(s) that you
want to see on every page. Finish with OK or other print
settings.
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6. Fit to Page
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Unlike Word documents, content is not limited by the paper size
or orientation. A worksheet can be split into as many pages as
needed to display the content but sometimes you might want to
fit all data into one page by height or width.
First, under File > Page Setup, set margins to the smallest
size that will work for your layout. Change paper size and
orientation if you want. Next, select the Page tab and under the
Scaling category pick Fit to. For instance, if you want to fit
all data columns on one lengthwise page, change orientation to
landscape and choose Fit to 1 page wide by 99 pages tall. This
setting won't stretch pages to 99 pages but will make sure that
a low value won't accidentally shrink the pages to a much
smaller size.
Another option under Scaling is to adjust the size to a
percentage of the normal size.
Important: when Scaling other than 100% is used, manual page
breaks are ignored.
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7. Easy Page Setup on Multiple Worksheets
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I was heading down the hall in a client's office when one of
the managers pulled me into his office. He had just spent the
entire morning repeating the same page setup choices for each of
the worksheets in a large Excel workbook. "Is there an easier
way?", he asked.
Here's what you want to do to apply an identical print page
setup to a set of worksheets: group them. Two of the ways
to group worksheets are: to highlight all of the worksheets in a
workbook, right-click on any of the sheet tabs and left-click on
the option Select All Sheets; to select only specific
worksheets, hold down the [Ctrl] key while clicking on each of
the worksheets that you want to group together. You will see
[Group] display in the title bar next to the workbook name.
Now for the easy part, choose File > Page Setup and pick each
of the options that you want for the worksheet layout including
margins, headers and footers, and paper size.
Tip or disaster? Once you are finished with the Page Setup, make
sure that you immediately ungroup the worksheets because
anything else that you do will also be a part of each worksheet
including data entry, editing and formatting. To ungroup the
worksheets, just right-click on any worksheet tab and pick
Ungroup Sheets. The [Group] label will no longer display in the
title bar.
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Please pass this along to others who may appreciate it!
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The Software Pro(TM)
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