While Excel workbooks can be used entirely electronically, you may find that you need
to print them as well. It's important to understand not only how
to print, but how to prepare your workbook for printing.
The first thing I would encourage you to do is to add the Print Preview icon to your Quick
Access toolbar if you think you may print your worksheets.
It's always good to see how something looks before you print it, and having the Print
Preview command on the Quick Access toolbar will make it a lot easier.
In addition to accessing the Print Preview command from the toolbar, you can also access
it by left-clicking the Microsoft Office Button and selecting Print.
From the Print menu, you can choose Print Preview, which lets you see how the worksheet
will appear printed, Quick Print, which prints one copy to the default printer, or Print,
which allows you to set specific print options. We'll talk more about this later.
Let's look at our household budget in Print Preview format.
I can just select it from here, or from the Quick Access toolbar.
And now we can see that our view has changed. The tab at the top indicates that we are in
Print Preview. On the bottom, left side I can see that we're
viewing page 1 of 2. We can look at our spreadsheet and see that
our full title doesn't appear and that about half of our columns don't show up on the page.
This means that the rest of the columns June through December are on page 2.
I can view page 2 by clicking the Next Page command in the Ribbon and here's the rest
of my spreadsheet. And you can just click the Previous Page command
to go back to page 1. Now, before we leave Print Preview mode, let's
take a look at the other commands. You have the Print command, which opens the
Print dialog box. You also have the Page Setup command.
From here, you can access many of the same features as you can on the Ribbon such as
Orientation, Scaling, and more. If you're already in Print Preview, you can
make these changes from here, rather than closing Print Preview and modifying these
things from the Ribbon. You can also use the Zoom command to zoom
in and out. I usually stay zoomed out in Print Preview
so I can see what everything looks like. Finally, you have the Margins feature that
you can select and deselect. I think this is a really great feature in
Excel. Right in Print Preview I can change my margin
and column width settings. For example, let's say I want to make the
Paid column smaller, and the Bill column wider. I just have to hover over one of the margin
markers until the double-arrow appears, and then left-click and drag the line.
The change is made right here in Print Preview and is reflected in the actual spreadsheet.
We can leave Print Preview by clicking the Close Print Preview icon.
You should also become familiar with the Page Layout tab.
From here can customize some of our options so that the spreadsheet prints the way that
we want it to. We saw in Print Preview that we can modify
our margins, and you can do the same thing by left-clicking the margins command and choosing
one of the predefined settings, or by entering custom margins.
You can also change the page orientation. You may want to do this depending on whether
your worksheet has more information left to right, which might be better suited to the
Landscape orientation. To change the orientation select either Portrait
or Landscape. We are in Portrait mode right now.
Portrait orients everything on the page vertically, while Landscape orients the page horizontally.
We've already seen how this worksheet will look printed in portrait format, so let's
try Landscape. When you select it, you won't notice anything
change in the current view, but if you click the Print Preview command you'll see now that
3 extra columns of info appear on this first page.
You may also notice that we're on Page 1 of 3.
When we changed to Landscape, some of the information on the bottom of our worksheet
was cut off and now appears on page 2 and page 3 has our extra columns.
Even with some information on other pages, the Landscape orientation just makes more
sense for this spreadsheet. I can still tweak the worksheet so all the
information appears. I can do this using the Scale to Fit group.
From here I can modify the scale settings by typing numbers into the field, or using
the arrows. Currently the worksheet is printing at 100%.
Since we're not far from getting everything to print on one page, let's decrease that
to 75% and see what happens. You won't notice a change in the spreadsheet,
but when you click Print Preview, that's when you'll be able to tell if all your information
will print on one page. And we can see that it does.
Scale to Fit is a great tool if things just don't quite fit on a sheet.
Keep in mind though that you can scale things down so much that it's difficult to read when
printed, so be careful! We're going to leave our paper size set to the standard 8.5 by
11, but you could change that here if you wanted to.
By default, the print area is the entire worksheet, but in Excel you can choose to select a different
print area. For example, if I only wanted to print the
part of my worksheet that shows my bills January through April, all I need to do is select
the cells I want by left-clicking my mouse and dragging it over those cells.
Now, click the Print Area command, and choose Set Print Area.
If we go up to Print Preview, we can see that only those cells we selected will be printed.
To go back to the default setting, which is the entire worksheet, just click the Print
Area command and then select Clear Print Area. Another feature that is worth showing is the
Breaks command, which allows you to insert page breaks at various points in the spreadsheet.
This gives you control in determining where you want new pages to start.
This is especially important when dealing with long spreadsheets, it's quite possible
that the page won't naturally break in a location that makes sense.
To insert a page break, select the cell below where you want the break to appear.
Now, select the Breaks command and select Insert Break.
If you click Print Preview, you'll be able to see that a new page begins exactly where
you placed the page break. The last feature I'll show you before we actually
print is the Print Titles command. I think this is one of the key things you
need to know before you print multi-page worksheets in Excel.
It's a lot easier for me to show you what this command does than tell you.
To see how this works, click the Print Titles command.
The Page Setup dialog box appears. Now we want to select what rows or columns
that we want to appear on every printed page. I inserted a page break awhile ago so that
my fixed and variable expenses would appear on one page, and everything else would appear
on another. I'd still like the headings that appear in
row 7 to appear at the top of page 2, so I'll click the icon, select the row in my spreadsheet,
click the icon again, and then select OK. I can go into Page Preview and see now that
Bills, Date, Paid, and the months appear at the top of page 1 and page 2.
Once I'm ready to print, I can do so from here, or from the Microsoft Office Button.
I'll just left-click the button and select Print and then Print.
And the Print dialog box appears. My default printer appears selected but you
can change that if you wish. You can also click Properties to access a
variety of options such as printing in black and white versus color, single versus double-sided
printing, and more. These things vary from printer to printer
so we won't look at those. Now, you will need to choose whether you want
to print specific pages, or all of the worksheet. Whether you want to print a selected area,
the active sheet, which in this case is Sheet One, or the entire workbook.
We've actually only been working with one sheet right now, but if you had information
on these other worksheets, you could print it all by selecting Workbook.
Once you've specified how many copies you'd like to print, just click OK.
Whether you're reviewing data, marking off a checklist, or distributing handouts,
these are all great reasons to start printing a worksheet or workbook in Excel today!