“Save Paper, Save Environment”. Excel is the most common tool used in various offices worldwide and there are many instances where we are required to take out the printouts. Do we wisely use printing options available in excel tool? The answer may be ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Well, most of us just press CTRL+P to take the printouts and sometime do hit and trial to take out neat prints of an excel sheet. We all must learn the art of taking out prints wisely. Following is a list of Excel printing tips that I have compiled –
Flickr photo [herrakewl]
20+ Printing Tips for Excel Spreadsheet
Change the print resolution or print quality for a worksheet
Taking high quality prints is advisable for special purpose, say preparing your school project report, discussion on sales budget with your manager, et cetera. Using a high dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution for printing produces quality printing results, but it may take longer to print. Instead, the resolution settings can be changed to a lower dpi setting easily. Some of the printers support draft quality printing for faster printing. You may check if your printer supports draft quality printing. For step by step process visit here.
Print a worksheet or workbook
Sometimes, the excel workbook contains lots of sheets inside. Many of us just take the printouts of different sheets one by one which is a time consuming process and is very annoying. Do you know that you can print entire or partial worksheets and workbooks, one at a time, or several at once. For step by step process visit here.
Use Page Layout view to fine-tune pages before printing
To give a professional look for your prints make sure you fine-tune the excel workbook (containing multiple charts and large data) in the Page Layout. In Normal view, you can change the layout and format of data, but in addition, you can use the rulers to measure the width and height of the data, add or change page headers and footers, , change the page orientation, set margins for printing, hide or display gridlines, row and column headings, and specify scaling options. When you finish working in Page Layout view, you can return to Normal view. For step by step process visit here.
Scaling a worksheet for printing
To save paper it is extremely important to scale a worksheet before taking excel prints by shrinking or enlarging its size to better fit the printed pages and the paper width of printed pages. For step by step process visit here.
Define or clear a print area on a worksheet
Sometime we need to take the printout of specific area in a excel sheet. For instance, a worksheet contains large amount of sale data along with sales chart, and you are required to take the printout for the sales chart and not the data. In that case print area comes into picture. Just define a print area that includes just that selection. When you print the worksheet after defining a print area, only the print area will print. You can add cells to expand the print area as needed, and you can clear the print area to print the entire worksheet again. For step by step process visit here.
Print a worksheet in landscape or portrait orientation
By default, Excel prints worksheets in portrait orientation. You can change the page orientation to landscape on a worksheet-by-worksheet basis. If you always want to print worksheets in landscape orientation, you can create a template, change the page orientation from portrait to landscape, and then use that template as the basis for all future workbooks. For step by step process visit here.
Adjust page breaks to control what is printed on each page
Sometime it is a challenging task to print a worksheet that has many rows and columns. Before taking printouts, you can quickly rearrange page breaks to define what will be printed on each page. Your printout will look just right, and no paper is wasted on unnecessary or blank pages. For step by step process visit here.
Set page margins before printing a worksheet
Page margins are the blank spaces between the worksheet data and the edges of the printed page. Page margins can be used for some items such as headers, footers, and page numbers. To better align a worksheet on a printed page, you can use predefined margins, specify custom margins, or center the worksheet horizontally or vertically on the page. For step by step process visit here.
Set the printing order of worksheet pages
To cut down the time for arranging the printed excel sheets manually you can use the order functionality that allows you to control the order in which worksheet pages are numbered and printed when the data does not fit on one page. By default, Excel prints pages from the top down and then left to right on the worksheet, but you can change the direction to print pages from left to right and then from the top down. For step by step process visit here.
Repeat specific rows or columns on every printed page
Data labeling is very much required, if a worksheet spans more than one page, you can print row and column headings or labels (also called print titles) on every page to ensure that the data is properly labeled. For step by step process visit here.
Print row and column headings on every printed page
By default, Excel doesn’t print the column headings (A, B, C, etc.) or row headings (1, 2, 3, etc.) that you see on screenshot below.
If you want to print column and row headings on every page of the printed workbook visit here.
Print gridlines in a worksheet
By default gridlines don’t appear on a printed worksheet or workbook in Excel 2007. To make the gridlines appear in your printed worksheets follow the step by step process here.
Print a PivotTable report
Printing a PivotTable report requires a combination of print features for worksheets and PivotTable reports. To use these features, you must have only one report on the worksheet, or you must set a print area that includes only one report. For step by step process visit here.
Print mailing labels for an address list in Excel
To create and print the mailing labels, you must first prepare the worksheet data in Excel and then use Word (Mail Merge) to configure, organize, review, and print the mailing labels. The mail merge process creates a sheet of mailing labels that you can print, and each label on the sheet contains an address from the list. For step by step process visit here.
Print Comments
If your worksheet contains comments, you can print them as they appear on the sheet or at the end of the sheet. For step by step process visit here.
Print an Excel table
If the data that you want to print is in a Microsoft Office Excel table, you can print just the Excel table. For step by step process visit here.
Print a control on a worksheet
You may want to print a control because it contains data or images that you want to include on a printed document. For step by step process visit here.
Make a worksheet fit the printed page
If your worksheet has a lot of columns, you can use the Scale to Fit options to reduce the size of the worksheet to better fit the printed page. For step by step process visit here.
Quick Tips -
- Always specify the number of pages before taking printouts. Do not print pages that are not required at all.
- Print in duplex mode to save 50% paper.
- Use ‘Quick Print’ option that allows you to send a document to the default printer without the need of entering values in a dialog box.
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