Excel - Printing Worksheets

The Paperless Office

People have been banging on about the "paperless office" for years but predictions of an all-digital future where paper is but a memory are premature. The reality is that, despite all the changes we have seen over the past few decades, paper documents are still with us.

A Paperless Office?

I would much rather send an Excel document as an email attachment than send it to a printer but sometimes you have to. You don't want to but you have to print out a hard copy... and it looks a right old mess. 

It's not that difficult to get an Excel spreadsheet to look good on paper and I hope that this article will give you a few bright ideas and a happy printing life.

Plan Ahead, Use Page Layout View

I've never indulged in the practice myself but I've heard that some people actually plan ahead before they do something. Amazing. Excel worksheets don't always look good on paper because they're not designed to fit on a page—they're designed in the Normal View.  This is everyone's favourite view for working in Excel, it's great for editing and viewing on screen but hopeless as a design view as you can't see the document on the page.

If you know that you will need to print your Excel document in the future then switch over to the Page Layout View to design it first. Set the page orientation and work on a document where you can see exactly what you are doing, see exactly how much data you can get on a page, see your headers and footers etc. When you come to print the worksheet there will be none of that business of trying to coax it onto sheets of A4 because it already fits. No surprises.

1. Preview your worksheet before you print

You can see exactly how your worksheet will look on the printed page by using the Print Preview feature. In terms of saving you time and paper, Print Preview is your most valuable printing tool. You can even make certain changes within it, like clicking on and dragging the print margins to make them wider or narrower. Check it as you change printing and layout options to make sure your spreadsheet looks the way you want it to look.

3. Scaling

You're limited by the dimensions of the paper you're printing on, but there are ways to make the most of this space. Try changing the page orientation. The default orientation is good for data with more rows than columns, but if your worksheet is wider than it is tall, change the page orientation to landscape. Still need more room? You can change the width of the margins on the edge of your paper. The smaller they are, the more room there is for your data. Finally, if your worksheet isn't huge, try playing with the Custom Scaling Options to fit all of your rows, columns, or entire worksheet on one sheet of paper.

2. Decide what you're going to print

If you only need to look at a certain segment of your data, don't bother printing your entire workbook—just print the specific data. You can print just the worksheet you're viewing by going to the print pane and selecting Print Active Sheets, or you can select Print Entire Workbook to print the entire file. You can also print a small segment of your data by selecting the data, then choosing Print Selection in the print options.

4. Use Print Titles

Once your Excel sheet is more than one page long, understanding what you're looking at can get tricky. The Print Titles command lets you include a title row or column on each page of your spreadsheet. The columns or rows you select will show up on every page of your printout, which makes reading your data a lot easier.

5. Use page breaks

If your worksheet takes up more than one sheet of paper, consider using page breaks to decide exactly which data should be on which page. When you insert a page break into your worksheet, everything below the break is moved to a different page than everything above it. This is useful because it lets you break up your data exactly the way you want.

Following these tips will go a long way toward making your printed worksheets easier to read. For more printing tips and detailed instructions for the tips listed above, review our Printing Workbooks lesson.