/ Excel spreadsheet prints strange

Excel spreadsheet prints strange

My Excel spreadsheet prints strange. Can I fit the spreadsheet on one page?

Celeste Stewart One of my biggest pet peeves with Excel involves printing large spreadsheets. The very nature of Excel makes for wide printouts as each record stretches across the screen. While I might have a spreadsheet that looks good on my wide screen monitor, the printout is an impossible mess! Short of taping a bunch of pages together, what’s an Excel user to do?

Fortunately, you can control the way Excel prints. First, let’s take a look at the Print Area command before digging into the various print settings. You can control which areas print on a page by setting the Print Area. This helps to avoid printing blank pages or pages with information that you may need in the spreadsheet for calculation purposes but not necessarily for general viewing. To do this, highlight the text that you want to print and then go to File >Print Area > Set Print Area. In Excel 2007, highlight the text, go to the Page Layout tab, and select the Print Area icon. Choose Set Print Area.

Once the print area has been set, you will see a dotted line indicating the page boundaries. As your document evolves, you may need to clear and reset the print area. For example, you may need to add columns outside of the boundary. Keep this in mind as you edit your documents and adjust the print area as necessary. Otherwise, your new data won’t print.

While setting the print area is a good first step, it doesn’t solve the problem of wide records fitting on the page properly. While in the Page Layout area (either through File >Page Setup or the Page Layout tab depending on your version of Excel), you can further fine tune your spreadsheet. For example, you can adjust the margins, orientation, size, page breaks, and titles.

Adjusting the margins and orienting the page to landscape mode rather than portrait mode often does the trick. A few tweaks of column widths may also be needed. This option is ideal for those spreadsheets that “almost” fit across a page.

In addition, you can also scale the image down to less than 100% or even choose the option to fit the entire spreadsheet on a single page. Of course, doing so depends on the size of the spreadsheet. If you have a huge spreadsheet, shrinking it to fit on a single page will make it microscopic. A better idea is to scale it down to a legible size.

One problem when you print Excel spreadsheets on multiple pages is that you lose the column headings on the pages that follow. You can set Excel to print the title rows across the top and the columns on the left side. This helps to clarify the data on each page.

You can also set the printed page order to either print down then over or over then down.

As you adjust the print settings, use the Print Preview feature to see how your changes affect the printed document. Print Preview provides shortcuts to these various setting options as well.