How to Print a Large Spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel  

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Printing an Excel Spreadsheet

Has this ever happened to you? You create an Excel spreadsheet - it's taken you days
to get all the data together and into a useful format. You push the printer icon and your
printer suddenly starts gobbling paper, spitting out sheet after sheet of paper full of
numbers with no indication at all what page it is, what the data is about, no column
headings. YIKES!

It's not always necessary to print a spreadsheet, you might just use the data over and
over, or you might email it to someone else. Chances are though, that you may need to
print your work, especially in order to share the data with your boss. But as in the above
example, if you just hit the print button on the toolbar, you may be unpleasantly
surprised with what pops out of your printer. Depending on the size of the spreadsheet,
you may end up with a lot of sheets of paper with little indication of what the rows and
columns represent. What a mess! I know. It's happened to me.

Here are some tips on how to print in Excel so your data becomes informative and not
just a waste of paper and ink.
Difficulty: Moderately Easy
Instructions
Things You'll Need:

 A PC running Microsoft Excel

 A printer hooked up to your pc
 paper and ink

1. Step 1

SET PRINT AREA - It's quite possible to have a spreadsheet that might print dozens,
even hundreds of pieces of paper, but maybe you only want to have a hard-copy of
part of it. This function is so important, that I suggest you customize a toolbar button
for it, placing it next to the Print Preview button. [I will write a separate article on this,
meanwhile you can follow the basic steps outlined in my article on adding the insert
rows and column buttons in the resources section or just do it through the file menu
 as I'll explain here.]

You must select the area of the spreadsheet that you want to print before you set it
as the print area. Do this by placing your cursor in the top left cell of the area you
want to print. Hold down the shift key and keep it depressed while you move your
cursor to the bottom right cell of the area you want. Click into the last cell and you've
got the area highlighted. Now either click the Set Print Area button you've added to
your toolbar, or use the File menu: Print Area, Set Print Area, which is the keyboard
sequence ALT, F, T, S. Now that you've limited what you will print, there will be
dashed lines around the area. You may also see dotted (or smaller dashes) within
the area. That tells you that it doesn't fit on one page.

2. Step 2

PAGE SETUP - Using the menu, choose FILE menu, Page Setup, which is the
sequence ALT, F, U. Alternately you can get to this through the Print Preview button,
which is my preferred method (except for the Sheet Tab). There are 4 tabs on this
Setup window.

3. Step 3

PAGE TAB:

Orientation - in this window you can choose Portrait (vertical) or Landscape

(horizontal), which may take care of your pagination problems. Many spreadsheets
are wide across, and it's really not too readable to have a page break in the width, if it
can be avoided. Your first decision then is to make it print in Landscape mode to give
it as much space across as possible.

Paper Size - You can also choose what size paper you're using: if you have legal size
paper, and your printer can accept it, that will often help get all the columns onto one
page. You don't mind having it paginate rows, but it's much harder to read if you can't
get all the columns on one sheet.

Scaling - If you still have a column or two that won't fit on your landscape page (and
maybe you don't have legal size paper), you have one more option - scaling. There
are two options in the Scaling section. Play with the second option first.

Fit to (one) page(s) wide by (one) page(s) tall. - This second option might be all you
need. Accept the 1 in the first box (for width), and delete the number in the box for
how tall you want it, because you don't care. Tap ENTER.

Tap the Print Preview button on the toolbar and see if you like how it looks. It might
be way too small to read, or it may be just fine. Tap the SET UP button at the top of
the Print Preview screen, and you'll be right back at that PAGE tab you were just
working with. In the Scaling box, you'll see a percentage that is what the computer
 came up with in order to scale your print out to one page wide. If you liked it, you
might want to make a (mental?) note of that percent. If the preview showed it as
being just too teeny weeny, and you're seeing a percent like 40% or smaller, then
you're just not going to get it onto one page.

4. Step 4

MARGINS TAB - One other thing you can try, before you completely give up trying to
get the entire width of the spreadsheet to print on one page, is to change the
margins. That is the second Tab on the Set up menu, but it's easier to do it directly in
the Print Preview screen where you can see the results immediately. When you tap
the Print Preview button, your print area will show up on this preview screen. Margins
may or may not show at this point (depending on the last time you did this, or the last
person to use Excel on this computer). If you don't see the margins as a pair of
dotted lines near the top, a pair of dotted lines near the bottom, and two vertical
dotted lines on either side, then press the MARGINS button at the top of the Print
Preview window and you will.

With the margins displayed, you can drag them with your mouse to try to make more
internal room on your paper. You'll probably fiddle mostly with the margins at the
sides of the page. Remember that your printer may have its own ideas about
margins, and may be unable to print all the way to the edge. Excel will take your
printer's limitations into account as best it can, so if you try to take the margin too far,
nothing will happen. Move the margins in smaller increments so you can see results.
Chances are you can't have margins smaller than a quarter inch, or maybe a bit more
than that. Experiment.

You've got one more option with changing margins. You can change the width of
some of the columns. Maybe you've allowed more space for some columns than they
really need. Maybe a very wide column doesn't need to have all of it print in order to
be understandable. You can drag the internal margins for the column widths just as
you did the page margins.

Once you've got your spreadsheet to appear on one width of paper, you might also
play around with getting the length onto one sheet total. It certainly saves paper not
to have two orphaned rows show up on a last sheet of paper if you could have
changed the top and bottom margins just a little.

Horizontal or Vertical Centering - If you are printing a small spreadsheet, it is more

attractive to have the small amount of data centered, rather than all in the upper left
corner. If you choose to Center on Page Horizontally, it will be centered at the top of
the page. If you choose (only) Center on Page Vertically, it will be in the middle of the
page, but over on the left. Centering both Horizontally and Vertically may look
professional, or

5. Step 5
 Header Footer Tab

HEADER/FOOTER TAB - Now that you like how the data looks, it's time to explain it.
Use a Header to describe what is in the Spreadsheet. The third tab in the PAGE
SETUP window is Header/Footer. You can choose one of the suggested Headers
and Footers, which are found by pressing the square button with a down-triangle next
to the open box under Header (or Footer). For instance, you might decide it is
sufficient to have the page number and the file name as the header - which is an
option near the bottom of the list.

6. Step 6

Custom Header Window with 3 sections

Customizing a HEADER or FOOTER:

It's better to customize your own Header (and possibly footer) if you're printing your
spreadsheet for a presentation of any kind. Tap the CUSTOM HEADER button under
the options list.

You'll find that Excel now presents you with three sections for your Header. Use the
Center section for the descriptive name of the spreadsheet. Type in whatever you
want, and you can format it using the button with a big A. If you format before you
type, anything you type in that section will be formatted that way. If you type first,
then select the text you want to format and then press the A button and choose the
fonts, size and other attributes.

In the Left Section, you might want the date. Click in the left section, then press the
button that has two tiny calendar pages. If you want the time, press the button with
the clock.
 In the Right section, you might want the page number (or you may choose to put the
page numbers in the footer). Click the section, then press the button with a # on it,
which will give you the page number. If you like you can type ' of ' (space of space)
and then click the button with two plus signs, which gives the total number of pages.

For your own purposes (for finding the spreadsheet again in your computer a few
years from now), you might want to have the path and file name somewhere in the
header or footer (footer is better, I think). Either press the icon with a Folder (path
and file) or the icon with a piece of paper and the excel symbol (filename only). You
can also press the button with the icon of worksheet tabs, and it will include the name
of the worksheet.

7. Step 7

SHEET TAB - This article has gotten very long, so I'll just mention the last tab on the
Page Setup Menu: Sheet. In this tab are some very useful functions, including
whether or not you want to print gridlines in your hardcopy. You can decide the order
of printing when it is more than one sheet wide and long: across then down or down
then across. What will make more sense to YOU when you're pulling it out of the
printer?

Oddly, if you go to this window from Print Preview, you cannot access the set print
area, or Rows to Repeat at Top or Columns to Repeat at Left boxes. If you want to
print specific column headings or row headings on a large print out (which is a very
good idea), you have to access this window using the file menu: Page Setup, Sheet
tab. Then you can select a row at the top that contains column headings, and a
column at the left that contains row headings.

If you follow these tips, you will be able to print your Excel spreadsheet and have it
look professional and informative, not just like a sheaf of papers with

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