The First Post, the First of Many Excel Lessons

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you find the information here useful. Feel free to comment, or request future lessons. My goal is to have these lessons work as a progression. To begin I will start some some basic features of Excel. As this blog progresses, I will begin to work with more advanced features of Excel, and will begin doing series of posts for more complex topics. Please feel free to suggest topics if you have something you know you should be able to, but just aren't sure how.

This Weeks Theme: Printer-Friendly Spreadsheets
Todays Lesson: Basic Methods of Setting the Print Area

Often I am sent spreadsheets from friends and co-workers, which when printed, output very poorly. This is often the fault of little to no attention to the print area of a spreadsheet. Today, I am going to cover three ways in which you can set the print area.

• Set Print Area
• Page Break Preview
• Page Setup
  

Set Print Area
The first option is to highlight the area you want to have print with your cursor, and then use the Set Print Area Option.

First, highlight the cells you want to show up when you print. In my case, I want Range A1:I20 to print:


Once you've done this, go to File -> Print Area -> Set Print Area:


Now, when print, only the selected range will print out. This is great if you have work on the side of your worksheet that you don't want to print.

Page Break Preview
Page Break Preview allows you to view and edit the printable area of your spreadsheet as you are editing it. To enter Page Break Preview, click on View -> Page Break Preview.


You will notice that the area on the inside of the blue box has a white background, and everything outside is grey.


The area that is grey will not print, while the area that is white will print. You may modify the print area of your spreadsheet as you are working by clicking and dragging the blue lines in any direction.

Page Setup
Page setup allows you to define the number of pages you want your particular spreadsheet to print on. You can choose to either set a print area with one of the two above methods or not prior to doing this. Regardless of whether you do the above, you will be able to limit the number of pages your document pages on. The result is a potential shrinking of your text so that it will all fit on one page. To edit Page Setup, go to File -> Page Setup


Once in this screen, you can either click on "Adjust to % of normal size" or Fit to x by x pages. I recommend using the second option.


In our example, I've selected to fit the page to 1 wide by 1 tall. This means that everything on my spreadsheet will print out on only one page. Be careful, because if you have too much data on one page, this would result in some very small font!

As a final check to make sure your worksheet is going to print as you expect, I always recommend using the print preview feature. This allows you to see how your computer will print the document before you waste your paper on something that is completely unexpected.