Printing a Spreadsheet

Because a spreadsheet can be any size, printing a spreadsheet is a little more complex than printing a word processing document.

To set up how the page or pages will look, follow these steps:

1. Choose File > Page Setup to open the Page Setup dialog box.
2. On the Page tab, select the orientation ( Portrait or Landscape), Scaling (changes the amount of your worksheet which can fit on a sheet of paper), Print Quality, First Page Number (the default is set to 1). On the PC, you also set Paper Size (8 1/2 X 11 inches is the default setting) here. For the Mac, click Options to open a new dialog box where you can set the paper size, orientation, and scale.
3. On the Margins tab, set the four margins, the header and footer distance from the edge of the page. You can also center the spreadsheet horizontally and/or vertically.
4. On the Header/Footer tab, you can specify a header and footer.
5. On the Sheet tab, specify the range of cells you want to print if you want to print only a portion of the worksheet. In the Print Titles section, you can specify rows or columns to repeat on pages after page 1 (so you can see the column or row headings on all pages). In the Print section, check gridlines to print out all the gridlines that you see on your screen. If your spreadsheet is too large to print on one page, use the Page Order section to decide in what order Excel prints the sections of your spreadsheet.
6. Click OK when you are done.

To see in advance how your spreadsheet will look when printed (a wise idea):

1. Click Preview on the Standard toolbar.
2. If your spreadsheet will need more than one page, click Next to see additional pages. At the bottom of your screen, on the Status bar, you see the page you are one and the total number of pages required to print the spreadsheet.
3. Click Page Break Preview to see your entire spreadsheet broken up into pages. You may need to scroll to see the part of the spreadsheet you need. Excel places dashed lines to indicate the page breaks.
4. Drag these page break lines to adjust the page breaks as needed. (Excel will only allow you to create page breaks that work with the paper in your printer.)
5. Click Print Preview again to exit the page break preview.
6. Click Normal View to return to your spreadsheet, displayed in the normal way. You still see the page break lines.

Tip: You can go into page break preview at any time while you are creating your spreadsheet to get an idea of how the pages will be broken up. You can then design your spreadsheet so that it will fit on pages in a more logical way.

To print:

Click Print on the Standard toolbar.