One of the things that I love about Excel is the amount of control and flexibility it provides when printing.  In this post we will focus on some different ways of viewing what gets printed.  In the next post we will take a closer look at the various options which provide the wonderful control and flexibility.

YouTube Video on Printing in Excel

Here is a video which shows you how to print your work in Excel:

Print your work

Specifying an Area to Print

One of the first things to think about when printing is what do you want to print.  Quite often you only want to print part of a worksheet.

A useful technique is to specify the print area.

Set the Print Area

 

1. First select the range of cells that you would like to print.  For example, use your mouse to select the cell in the top left hand corner and, without releasing the mouse, drag this down to the bottom right hand corner.  In the example above, I would like to print A1 to F18 (written A1:F18). I don’t want to print my step by step calculation in rows 20 to 28.
2. Select the Page Layout tab in the ribbon, go to the Page Setup group, click on Print Area and select Set Print Area from the dropdown list.

This process of setting the print area creates what is called a “named range” called Print_Area.  Excel offers the ability to give a group of cells (called a range) a name using normal text, providing it doesn’t correspond to a cell reference.  (You can’t use something like CAT1 because there is a column labelled CAT so CAT1 represents the cell in the first row of this column.) When a named range is set up, it can be selected using the dropdown button in the Name box – the box just above the first column heading.  We will look at named ranges further in a future post.

If after selecting your print area, you still have some rows or columns within your print area that you don’t want printed, then one option is to simply hide these rows and/or columns.

1. Right mouse click the row (or column) heading.  For example, to hide row 7, right mouse click the number 7 on the left hand side.
2. Select Hide from the shortcut menu that displays.

Please note that hiding a row or column in this way, not only stops it from being printed out, but it also hides it from view when doing your calculations.

Printing Options on the Quick Access Toolbar

Now let’s look at the printing options available from the Quick Access Toolbar dropdown list: Quick Print and Print Preview.

Quick Print

Click Quick Print  on the Quick Access Toolbar to print the current sheet with the current print settings. You don’t get an option to change anything – it prints straight away.

If you have not specified the print settings then the default ones are used.  For example:

• Prints in portrait mode.
• It is not scaled, i.e. it is set to 100%.
• No headers or footers.
• The entire worksheet is printed (unless you have set a print area).

Print Preview

Click Print Preview  on the Quick Access Toolbar to preview what you are going to print and to have the opportunity to change some of the print settings.

Please note that if you have set the print area then only that selected range of cells displays.

I would like to draw your attention to three buttons on the Print Preview tab of the Ribbon.

•  Click Print to print with the current settings. The Print dialog box displays – see later on in this post. The Print Preview screen also closes.
• Click Page Setup to display or change some of the settings. The Page Setup dialog box displays.  We will look at the options in this box in the next post.
• Click Close Print Preview to close the Print Preview screen without printing.

Page Layout View

The Page Layout view was introduced in Excel 2007.  It enables you to see what the printed page looks like while you work in Excel.  The Print Preview screen above doesn’t allow you to edit the data on the worksheet; it is display only.  But the Page Layout view gives you all the access to Excel’s tools that the Normal view gives you, except that it also shows you what things look like on the printed page.

To access the Page Layout view, click the middle button in the group of three view buttons on the right hand side of the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

The Page Layout view also displays the margins, the white space on the edge of each side of the page.  If you don’t want to see the margins then click on the thin blue strip between the pages.  To see the margins again, including the header and footer, click on the thin blue strip again.

Page Break Preview

The Page Break Preview allows you to change where one page finishes and another one starts. You still have access to all of Excel’s tools that the Normal view has, however, you may need to change the zoom factor – see below.

 

To access the Page Break Preview, click the right hand button in the group of three view buttons on the right hand side of the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

The first time that you do this, the Welcome to Page Break Preview dialog box displays.  If you don’t want to keep on seeing this message each time you select this view then select the Do not show this dialog again checkbox before clicking OK.

You may notice the following things in this view:

• If you selected a Print Area then it is marked off with a dark blue line and all other  cells are greyed out.
• If there are dotted blue lines on this display then these show where the page breaks are.  These dotted lines can be dragged to change where the page breaks occur.  This is the primary function of this view.
• The size of the worksheet area has been scaled down.  Use the Zoom control in the bottom right hand corner to enlarge the display, if desired.
• The page numbers display in the background of the sheet in grey writing, for example, Page 1.

After you have finished making the changes to where the page breaks occur, you can change back to the Normal view by clicking the left hand button in the group of three view buttons on the right hand side of the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Summary

So this is an introduction to the three different views (Normal, Page Layout and Page Break Preview) and the Print Preview screen.  The next Introduction to printing post explains how to easily add headers and footers and some of the other features on the Page Layout tab.