Tip #90 - Printing Excel Worksheets

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.

 Happy Computing!

View Diane's Webpage for more tips.