Printing Excel Spreadsheets

Many Excel users, even those who have completed Microsoft Excel Training, have trouble printing out their spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are often laid out in non-printer friendly ways making it difficult to print them out in a way that makes sense. If you have a large spreadsheet, follow these tips to print them properly.

First, get familiar with the Page Setup area found in the Page Layout tab of Microsoft Excel 2007. Similar features are found in other versions of Excel. Here you can adjust margins, set the orientation of the spreadsheet to landscape or portrait, set the paper size, set the print area, insert page breaks, and set titles to print on each page.

Setting the print area is one of the best ways to control your printouts. For example, you may only need to print a specific area of the spreadsheet, not the entire list of data. To set the print area, simply highlight the data that you want to print, click the Print Area icon, and choose Set Print Area.

Setting the titles to print on each page helps when the spreadsheet is more than one page long. By having the header rows repeat across the top and the column labels on the left, the printout is easier to understand. Simply click Print Titles which opens the Page Setup dialog box. From here, you can select the rows and columns you want to print on each page. While in this dialog box, you can also make other adjustments including how you want the pages ordered, whether or not to print comments and cell errors.

Another useful tip when the spreadsheet doesn't quite fit on a page is to adjust the scale of the worksheet. To do this, go into the Page Setup dialog box and click on Page. In the Scaling area, you can either adjust the page to a percentage of its original size or fit it to a specific page size.

Microsoft Excel 2003 Training covers the page and printing tasks unique to the 2003 version of Excel while Microsoft Excel 2007 Training shows you how to do it in the 2007 edition. Make sure to choose the appropriate training.